


Iron Sharpens Iron

by Lillian_Shepherd



Category: Iron Man: Armored Adventures, Marvel Multiverse - Fandom
Genre: Captain America/Iron Man Big Bang 2016, Dubious Morality, Horror, M/M, Minor Character Death, Twisted trope:amnesia, Twisted trope:soulmates, non consensual body modification of minor character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-28
Updated: 2016-11-28
Packaged: 2018-09-02 03:19:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 38,402
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8649544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lillian_Shepherd/pseuds/Lillian_Shepherd
Summary: If the not-a-present Tony Stark received from Gene Khan on his nineteenth birthday was a puzzle, it was dwarfed by more urgent and dangerous events. Starting with the explosion of the helicarrier, where Captain America's supposedly brain-dead body had gone missing. Was the man suffering from amnesia Iron Man rescued a few hours after the wreck the Captain? If not, who was he? And why were they so attracted to each other? Had SHIELD kept Cap alive simply to extract the serum? And why was a Doombot, not to mention Madame Masque, trying to break into Tony and Howard's home?





	

**Author's Note:**

> First of all, many, many thanks to Kakushimiko for the great art that goes with this fic - link to her Tumblr page in the end note. She has been a pleasure to work with. Go and tell her how great she is.
> 
> Thanks also, as ever, to Ellex42 for a great fast beta and ameri-pick. I did a little bit of polishing after she'd dealt with it, so any mistakes are definitely mine!
> 
> There is no need to have seen the cartoon 'Iron Man: Armoured Adventures' to understand this story but, as all the background information is accurate to canon, it contains a large number of spoilers for that series. Nevertheless, despite the absence of an unfrozen Cap in canon, I heartily recommend the animation, even if the idea of a teen Tony turns you off - believe me, it is far far better than the comics teen Tony (which we are all trying to forget.) As I start a year after the series ends, Tony, Pepper and Rhodey are nineteen, and therefore adult.
> 
> The colour of the place and time scene headers marks a particular character point of view. You'll soon work it out.
> 
> And yes, this is the one canon where I could have used the Howard Stark's A-plus Parenting tag unsarcastically. Howard is a good guy here, and Pepper's first name is Patricia, not Virginia

_Iron Man Armoury, Stark House, Long Island. Tony Stark's nineteenth birthday. Wednesday, 6:23 pm_

The strange this-is-not-Makluan (at least according to Gene) device sat on one of the benches in Tony's workshop and sneered at him. He had probed it remotely with every instrument at his disposal and found absolutely nothing. If it had internal structure it was on a level below nanotech. What looked like embedded circuitry turned out to be decoration. Pressing what looked like buttons had no effect. He'd even tried to contact it with Extremis, but the thing just sat there. If it contained any electronics they were not contemporary Earth tech.

And yet.

His instincts were shouting that this was a good thing, something he should reach out to, something that held a promise...

That he didn't trust instinct was the reason that, despite the fact that Gene had done so, apparently without harm, he wasn't going to touch it without the protection of the Iron Man armour.

The thing was obviously old, probably alien, and the only thing Tony was certain about that it was functional rather than decorative – and that was instinct going against all the facts.

If Gene had wanted to send him a birthday present, whatever video game was storming the Chinese charts would have been better than this puzzle.

 _What is this thing? Should I call the bomb squad?_ he had messaged to Kublai at Xanadu dot com, because though he and the Mandarin had finally fought the Makluan together, he was not sure Gene could keep the influence of the rings at bay for ever. World conquest might be on his agenda again.

 _Not sure myself, but it didn't explode on me,_ Gene had replied. _It's not Makluan. I can't make head or tail of it. Thought you might. My notes are in the package. Keep me informed?_

Tony still wasn't sure whether Gene's overtures were genuine, but there was evidence that the Mandarin had been surreptitiously intervening in emergencies throughout the Far East, and not on the side of the bad guys.

He wanted so desperately to believe that his friend, his fellow adventurer – the supervillain, his father's kidnapper – had reformed.

But he still didn't quite believe it.

Gene's notes said that the artefact was completely inert, though warm to the touch. Tony had no intention of personally verifying that but the armoury's sensors reported that it remained at room temperature. There was something about it that frightened him; perhaps the markings on its surface that resembled no recorded human script but which he was sure had meaning. There was a bright scratch on one side, where, apparently, Gene had scraped off the metal sample he had sent to Tony in a not-exactly-a-test-tube. Gene hadn't been able to identify it and neither had Tony but it wasn't vibranium or that equally strange metal, adamantium.

"Sir," the computer said. "It is time to get ready for your party."

"Plenty of time." Tony was far more interested in the artefact than what was only nominally his nineteenth birthday party. Tonight was about business; contacts and networking and encouraging clients and rivals to get inadvisably drunk.

In three days time, Tony and his Dad, Rhodey (on a weekend pass from the Air Force Academy), Rhodey's mother Roberta (if she broke free from that patent tangle), Happy (who was making a name for himself in the boxing ring when not working at his mechanic's apprenticeship), and Pepper and her father, would sit or sprawl watching bad geek movies while eating pizza, popcorn, and ice-cream, washed down with Coke, Dr Pepper, or beer.

Tonight, though, only his Dad would be there. Which was a relief because his friends would have been as bored as he was going to be.

He turned back to the artefact, only to be hit by a wave of dizziness. The strange glyphs swam before his eyes, forming and reforming into something close to sense.

Tony grabbed for a handhold, but somehow his palm slapped down on the device.

The pain was intense. He screamed and Extremis screamed with him. All contact with the electronic world was lost. The lab vanished, his body vanished and he was stretched into darkness. He was multitudes, each one battering against his mind, searching across the cosmos, yearning, lost and lonely...

For what seemed like years he searched desperately for... something. 

Again and again it seemed as if he had found whatever it was he was searching for and again and again it rejected him, was left behind or disappeared into the darkness. Except that something was following him, trailing behind him like a comet's tail. And it was growing...

Then multitudes consolidated into one – no, wait, two? – and he was whole in a way he had never been, but without any chance to rejoice or to analyse what was happening to him, he was spinning through time and space, dragging the fragile connection with him...

It vanished, and he was still falling, onto the floor of the workshop, where he lay bereft and shivering, with the beginning of a headache pounding behind his temples.

But he was a scientist and an engineer, even if not formally qualified in either. 

"Computer, report," he ordered, as he pushed himself up on his elbows. "What happened?"

Even as the computer said, "You fainted," the door to the workshop opened and Tony's father ran into the room.

"Tony, are you—? God, what happened? Are you all right?" Even as he spoke Howard was kneeling at his son's side.

"Fine, fine," Tony said, trying to scramble to his feet even as Howard grasped his arms to support him. "Just a tumble."

"You don't scream like that for a tumble. I could hear you in the house. Nor does every computer in the place scream with you. Not your heart?"

"It was just shock," Tony lied. "My heart's fine now, Dad."

Howard sighed, released Tony's arms, so he could run a hand through his hair. He was trying to smile, but Tony had known him too long to believe it was anything but forced. "You don't get enough sleep, son," he said. "Yes, I know I'm a fine one to talk – guess it must be genetic – but at your age you need your sleep. Maybe you should get some rest, join us later?

"It's my birthday party," Tony pointed out. "Or, at least, that's the excuse. I'm okay, Dad. I'll shower, change and be with you in fifteen minutes."

Howard looked at him assessingly. "Okay." This time the smile wasn't forced; indeed, it was more than a little smug. "Oh, I've been meaning to tell you – Virgil Potts called. Pepper arrived back yesterday. I told Virgil to bring her on over tonight. Consider it an additional birthday present."

"And you thought I was gonna sleep through that?" Tony managed a smile, though the thought of Pepper's incessant nervous chatter was enough to aggravate the headache.

Howard should have smiled in return. Instead, he was looking down at his hands. "Tony? What is this stuff you're covered in?"

His father's palms were coated in grey-white dust. Tony looked down at his bare arms, where the shape of his father's hands showed clearly as smudges on a thin white crust...

It looked almost like the remains of an Extremis cocoon.

Automatically, Tony reached for the electronics in the workshop, the rest of the armoury and the house and found them, and Extremis, functioning perfectly. 

But it was only when he was entering the shower that he noticed that the remains of the crust covered his entire body. It washed away easily enough, but the memory of it was not so easy to banish.

 

_Stark House, Long Island. Wednesday, 8:15pm_

It was a helluva thing to be spending your nineteenth birthday party avoiding the girl who'd been one of your best friends through high school, who'd covered your butt on innumerable occasions, who'd saved your life in the flying battlesuit that you'd built for her at her request – he wasn't mean enough to call it nagging – and who most people, including her, assumed that you'd eventually marry.

He should have been excited about her being here, had been excited about the private movie party to come, but his father's announcement had left him feeling flat and empty.

And when Pepper, in a stunning backless evening dress made of some midnight blue material that glittered with reflected light, swept out of the elevator on her father's arm, he had found himself trying to fade into the background. He'd also helped himself to a Martini which he had poured into a tumbler, discarding the olive and other decoration in the nearest wastebasket.

This time last year he'd never had a drink, but then at this time last year he, Pepper and Rhodey had been battling the invading Makluan, not to mention having their secret identities exposed later the same day. It had also been the first time he kissed Pep, even if it had only been a peck on the cheek.

But even as he had been making the decision that college could wait until he and Stark Solutions had helped his Dad lick Stark International back into some sort of shape after the mess Stane and Hammer had made of it – and reclaiming it had been difficult enough, though it had left him even greater respect for Roberta Rhodes' ability as a corporate lawyer – he had had that talk with Pep's father.

Which had sort of led to him misleading Pepper, if not lying to her directly.

 

_"Tony, Patricia hero worships you. She also thinks that she's in love with you. Maybe she is... or maybe she's in love with flying around shooting at things." Virgil Potts' mouth twisted in what was not quite a laugh. The observation was too close to the truth to be properly amusing._

_"I'd built Rhodey a battlesuit, sir. I didn't think it was fair not to build Pepper one too. Just because she's a girl."_

_"I have no doubt you're all for equality, son. But I know my daughter and I'm pretty sure you didn't have a choice about it. I'm proud of her. But she needs to gain some perspective. To go to college, meet other boys, have hobbies other than battling aliens and supervillains. Particularly if she's going to insist on joining SHIELD when she graduates." Tony could tell Virgil wasn't enthusiastic about that. "She's had an offer of a scholarship from SHIELD for a course at UCLA that General Fury originally suggested to her. For some reason she's hesitating."_

_"She knows I was thinking of MIT," Tony responded._

_"Howard says you intend to take a gap year."_

_"The company – both companies – need me, and so does Dad."_

_"Howard also says Cal Tech has been courting you. I'd prefer if you weren't close enough to distract her on a day to day basis but thinking you'll be in California with her might prompt her to accept the offer and the scholarship."_

_"We haven't spoken about it recently, but she must see how tied up I am with the company, and she knows there's nothing I won't do for Dad."_

_"My daughter isn't particularly good at predicting anyone else's thought processes, Tony."_

Which was all too true. And deep down he had been relieved. He liked – loved – Pepper but he'd been – was still – more attracted to Whitney – and he hadn't been in the least bit jealous when Pepper had been, sort of, pursuing Gene. Well, not jealous of Gene. Maybe he had a thing for supervillains after all.

_What he had said then was: "I won't lie to her."_

_"She won't give you the chance," her father had replied._

And so it had proved.

Pepper had been furious. He'd had to change his cell number because her texts were drowning his business mail.

She had been isolated at UCLA, while Rhodey was in his first year out in Colorado at the Air Force Academy. Tony himself had been working with his father and travelling the world, not to mention going on duty as Iron Man.

He'd updated the Rescue armour into a backpack version and with Rhodey's good offices as peacemaker, he and Pepper were back on even keel. And if the number he'd given her had been to a cell dedicated to her, so she didn't interfere with his work – well, she didn't need to know that.

Maybe what had thrown him earlier was that Pepper looked so grown-up. It was certainly a contrast to the way she had looked when he had escorted her to the Tomorrow Academy High School prom – and then abandoned her for an emergency that had needed Iron Man. Today she had stalked out of the elevator in a designer dress, immaculate make-up that hid her hated freckles and four-inch heels. Well, she was going to get a shock if she thought they would make her taller than him.

 

_5,000 feet above Long Island Sound. Wednesday, 8:30 pm_

The first thing he was aware of after the cold and empty dark was that his whole body was shaking and shivering, in retreat from a sense of losing something profoundly important. Something that had been snatched away from him when it was just within reach.

He was cold, which might explain the shivering if not the terror that accompanied it. There was a sharp pain in his arm, then another in his chest. Human hands lifted him, moved him onto something flat, secured some kind of binding across his chest and legs, and clamped a mask to his face...

He could breathe but the air tasted odd.

Except, now he came to consider it, he didn't know why he thought that, could not isolate what was wrong, couldn't remember what air normally tasted like.

Whatever he was lying on jerked to the right. Someone swore, low enough – or muffled enough – to be on the verge of his hearing.

Something wrong here.

He opened his eyes a slit.

Nothing. Was he blind? No, there was something, a shadow surrounding him with darker shadows moving beyond it.

"Hurry it up," a voice said, much clearer because it was angry.

"We have enough time." That was placating.

"Not if we're intercepted."

"Quiet, the pair of you. Just keep moving so we can get off this overgrown boat before she blows."

That was definitely not good.

He wriggled his right arm cautiously, and found it surprisingly easy to free it from the strap over his chest. Apparently it was not meant to disable him from escaping, but simply to hold him steady in whatever it was they had imprisoned him.

He tore the mask from his face, freed his left arm, reached for the catch on the band and wrenched it apart, then drove his fists and feet up into the shadow surrounding him. It cracked and shattered, and there was blinding light. He didn't let it slow him down, bounced to his feet and somersaulted sideways, pain tearing into muscle as something else pulled free. He landed in a crouch on a metal floor, cold beneath his bare feet. 

There were four men, all dressed in some kind of uniform, but ludicrously unprepared. Only one of them reacted swiftly enough to get a hand to his gun.

It was only when he stood looking down at their still bodies that he had time to wonder how he had done this, and why.

Except he had no time to think any further: there was a dull crack, like a high-powered rifle and the floor shuddered and lurched beneath him. Hot air blasted past, sending him to his knees.

Explosion.

The contraption on which he had been transported, which had been hovering above the floor with no visible means of support, swung towards him, and he had to leap aside to avoid it carrying him with it as it crashed into the wall.

Sirens were shrieking.

Pushing down panic, he scrambled to his feet with a little yelp of pain as he stood on some shards of... plastic?

 _Oh, yes, I punched that out but... why do I have bare feet? No,_ he corrected that thought, as he looked down. _Why am I completely naked?_

He had no answer and no time to work it out, so he just ran towards the explosion, ignoring the pain in his chest, his arms and his feet.

 _Signs on the doors are in English,_ he noted as he ran on. _Floors and walls are metal. Military base? Or a ship, maybe? If so, it's sinking._

_Or..._

A vague familiarity nagged at him, urged him to go up when he reached a stairway. Companionway?

Finally, he burst out onto a metal surface tilting to the right under the light of hazy stars. A massive tower loomed to his left, and an aircraft slid along the – deck? – in front of him.

He slid after it.

The sensation was not just of tilting but of falling...

And the noise of overstressed engines was louder than the sirens, louder than the screams—

Before him, there was nothing but sky. Desperately, he grabbed for a handhold. As the metal deck tipped at an angle that was rapidly approaching vertical he saw the lights of a city far away and the dark of water rushing towards him, a hundred, eighty, sixty feet below.

There was a flash behind him, the sound of another explosion racing at its heels. But by that time he had let go, was falling towards the water, somersaulting into a diving position.

He hit the surface, cleaving the water neatly, diving deeper, deeper, stroking hard away from the trajectory of the falling mass of metal – he wasn't guessing at the tonnage –

The underwater concussion wave grabbed him and tumbled him through the water, then lifted him twenty, thirty feet into the air, before finally dumping him so hard he felt muscle and bone creak, every molecule of air forced from his lungs.

Then the wave was gone, leaving him behind.

He thrust for the surface, caught a breath, and dived; sculling in the direction the wave had carried him. After all, he had glimpsed lights in that direction.

 

_Stark House, Long Island. Wednesday, 8:30pm._

"Pep, you look great," Tony said, putting more emotion than he felt into his voice, though the Martini had given him a faint buzz that was helpful. He was still vaguely detached from what was happening around him, had been ever since he had fallen in the workshop. 

_Concussion, maybe? I have the headache – but did I actually hit my head?_

"Wow!" Pepper flung back her own head – her hair was longer now, drawn into a chignon, and seemed a shade or two darker red – and stared up at him, brown eyes theatrically wide under arching brows. "What have you done with little Tony? Or are you wearing heels?" Her eyes moved down to his feet, as if she expected to find his shoes had lifts.

"No. You're the one who's balancing on stilts—"

But Pepper, as always, was already talking over him. "If so it makes you look kinda elegant, like your Dad. I like the designer stubble but please don't grow a moustache because that would be gross. Hey, I thought I saw the helicarrier over the Sound – did I tell you I flew in from California as Rescue? – thank you for the upgrade, by the way." Pepper interrupted her avalanche of words long enough to kiss him on the cheek.

He opened his mouth to comment but Pepper was off again. "Tomorrow can we fly out to it and see if General Fury will let us on board? I still need to impress him like wow! And don't think I've forgiven you yet for letting Dad send me off to California without you. You owe me, Tony Stark."

"I was wrong," Tony said. Then, as she took a breath. "You haven't changed one bit."

Pepper closed her mouth, then grinned at him. "Let's go somewhere we can, like, talk."

Tony nearly said, "You haven't stopped talking," but held his peace. He used to be able to tune Pepper out, but it seemed he was seriously out of practice.

Besides, people were beginning to turn their heads to look at them, some with disapproving frowns, some with indulgent smiles. Tony wasn't sure which he hated most. So he took Pepper's hand and led her quickly – well as quickly as she could manage in those heels – out onto the balcony that embraced the window wall that almost circled the house, giving spectacular views of Long Island Sound and the lights of New York's towers in the far distance. They would still be in view from inside, but that was, in itself, a kind of protection.

It was only as he closed the doors behind them that he realised that they were not the only people who had headed out here to take advantage of its privacy. One was his father – who he would never fail to recognise, even if, as here, he was only a shadow against the light from the window behind him – but the others were unrecognisable, the glowing tips of a cigarettes visible in a couple of hands resting on the balcony safety rail the only nearby light.

He should not have been surprised – the balcony could have held most of the party still going on on the other side of the windows. Indeed, his father had suggested staging a firework display to be viewed from there, but that might have brought back too many memories of their fight against the Makluan.

Damn it, those fucking aliens had messed up one of his chief pleasures in life: blowing things up—

Over the water, something high in the sky exploded – but it was far too big, far too bright for fireworks.

Tony recognised, within that blaze of light, a terrifyingly familiar shape. His eyes sought his father's and saw a similar recognition.

Howard had designed the helicarrier. "Go!" he said now.

Tony was already on the run.

"Hey, wait for me!" That was Pepper. "You must have a spare suit—"

Tony was already taking the stairs two at a time, because that was faster than the elevator. Yelling to the house computer he barrelled through the doors into his own apartment, and dived onto the repulsor platform that led to his armoury.

At least the latest upgraded suit would be waiting for him.

Long after he'd given up on being tall, dark and handsome and settled for being short and cute, he'd gotten the late growth spurt that everyone had predicted, so that even his one-size-fits-most armour found it difficult to accommodate his changing height. That seemed to have levelled off at last, just as his voice had settled to a pleasant light baritone. He was even trying to celebrate the fact that he now had to shave at least every two days by avoiding it and attempting to grow a beard.

Pepper's admonition against facial hair had suddenly made him more determined. A Van Dyke, maybe. Unlike a goatee, that had a moustache and would therefore annoy Pepper. It would still be different from his father and more dashing.

Besides, with any luck, it would make him look older. And a bit badass. Maybe he could make it a Tony Stark trademark...

 

Iron Man was first on the scene of the crash, but the air above the seething water was crowded with a mixture of SHIELD vehicles, all looking a little unsteady because they were overloaded with people. SHIELD command must have had some warning then, to be able to evacuate that many of its personnel.

_And how many had died? Had Fury? Maria Hill? Hawkeye or the Widow?_

Tony had already alerted the emergency services using Extremis, and the Navy and Air Force had weighed in with, "We're on our way, Iron Man."

_Where do I start?_

As he swooped lower, he saw the bodies in the water, making his path clear. Scan for body heat. Pick up anyone who showed signs of life and transport them to shore and the waiting ambulances.

After that, it would be a case of retrieving bodies. It was not an idea he would ever be comfortable with. 

Ten minutes later, Pepper arrived in the Rescue armour and started living up to her superhero name, but, really there was no one left to save, at least not in the water. The waves – water and shock – from the explosion had struck buildings and highways, bringing down the former and bowling cars from the latter. Luckily, they had not been strong enough to flood more than a couple of dozen roads and three railroad stations.

Bodies were being laid out under sheets in parking lots and gardens, and he and Rescue were reduced to retrieving more from the mud as the tide retreated.

Tony realised he was shivering in the climate-controlled armour, and didn't know why. Sure, this accident had its elements of horror, but he had seen far worse and the armour had always enabled him to maintain a little emotional distance. Not now. Now he was shivering and scared which he shouldn't be, never was in the armour, and he didn't know why.

 

_Long Island Sound. Wednesday, 8.55pm_

Surfacing at last, the fugitive – who still wasn't sure what he was a fugitive from – shook water from eyes that stung with mud and salt. He had already swallowed too much of it, and his mouth tasted foul in the aftermath. Behind him, the bulk of what-ever-it-was that had crashed with him was submerged, and what remained above the surface was close-to-invisible in the darkness.

He could still see tall buildings lit up in the distance, and strings of lights that marked a bridge. The buildings on the horizon on his right formed a skyline that held a vague familiarity, but that might just be that he had seen pictures of something like it.

_But when? When have I even seen pictures of anything?_

This must be a wide river or estuary – the latter almost certainly because of the salt in the water. 

Making up his mind, he began to swim towards the dark bulk of the shore blocking the stars in front of him, ignoring the call of the city lights.

 

Dragging himself onto the mud, he found himself crawling over a dead body. He jerked back from the shattered torso, as his stomach finally rebelling and emptying itself over the corpse. Though it seemed to have little in it but water.

Nor was this the only corpse on the mud flat. Though it was still dark and the stars and lights of the building were hazy, probably because the atmosphere contained smoke and smog, he could see surprisingly clearly, easily locating the dark bodies against the darker mud.

He looked down at his bare, pale skin and shivered.

 _They'll be able to see me,_ he thought, even though who 'they' might be was something of a mystery. But then he was a mystery to himself.

 _Enemies,_ his instinct answered.

 _How can I have enemies? I don't even know who I am,_ the reasoning side of his mind retorted.

It was true. Try as he might to remember anything before tonight, there was a blank wall. He didn't even know his own name.

He dismissed such thoughts as unimportant right now. What counted was survival. He was cold, but not as cold as he might have expected. And hungry. Ravenous, in fact. His injuries were painful but not unbearable, though they might become infected through contact with the estuary water.

Lips pressed tightly together, he moved on from the mutilated body – too close to the explosion, that one – and found the next was intact.

_Probably killed by the concussion from the explosion._

And just how was he so sure of that?

The body wore a uniform of some kind. Dark, almost certainly identical to those of his captors and probably distressingly obvious in city crowds. There also seemed to be some sort of utility belt.

The boots were plainly too small so weren't going to be of much use to him.

Still, beggars couldn't be choosers.

With some distaste he stripped the pants from what was plainly the largest of the bodies, rinsed them out in the river, and dragged them on, wet fabric recalcitrant against equally wet skin. The tunic was wearable as it stood, though it was too tight and now had a hole where he had torn away what was plainly an identifying badge.

There was a holster on the belt containing a pistol of a type he had never seen before, but there was nothing that suggested it would be any different in use from those he had...

_Had used before?_

Still no memory but, even though he felt a stab of distaste, the pistol fitted comfortably into his hand. Despite its soaking, it seemed to be in working order. He fired a single shot to make sure, and was startled by how quiet it was.

The utility belt also contained ammunition, some sort of candy bars, a first aid kit and currency. And a wallet that contained official identification – the usual declaration of identity signed by someone whose name appeared to start with an F and end with a Y without much of a middle – and a metal badge, yellow and enamelled in black, a stylised eagle holding a shield, with vertical red and white stripes, identical to the one he had torn from the tunic.

These men had been, apparently, agents of something called SHIELD.

Friend or enemy? His feelings towards the name were such a mixture that he could not isolate most of them.

But these people had been holding him captive, hadn't they? And they'd left him to die on some sort of huge aircraft as it had fallen from the sky. 

_Enemies then._

_Why can't I remember? I can read this, I know this language. It's called 'English'. What were these people doing with me? Well, at least I have an excuse, other than necessity, for stealing what I need._

He still didn't feel good about it but the dizziness receded as he wolfed down the candy bars. He also took the first aid kit for later use, and the currency which was, well, just bills with unknown faces on them. He could read the figures, though.

Examining three more bodies – one of which, God help him, was female – he obtained more candy bars, more ammunition and cash, and a pair of boots that were too narrow and too long, but were at least temporarily wearable.

 

_Southern Shore, Long Island Sound, Wednesday, 9.35pm_

Iron Man hovered a few inches above the mud so his eyes were on a level with Deputy Director Hill's. She was seated in the grounded SHIELD aircar she was using as a command vehicle and pretending to ignore him. 

After a few moments, she cleared her calls and turned to look into Iron Man's glowing eye-slits. "You wanted to talk to me, Stark? Why not on official communications?" 

"Not sure about your security," Tony replied. "Not after what happened tonight."

Hill rolled her eyes at him. "Thank you for your assistance, Mr Stark."

"What exactly did happen tonight? Did the helicarrier just decide to blow up? Or was she sabotaged?"

Hill said the last thing he expected. "The arc reactor went critical."

His answer was instinctive. "That's impossible."

"So we thought. We had a few minutes warning. Enough to start evacuation."

"General Fury?"

"He was in Washington at the Triskelion. He will be here in—" Hill glanced at the dash display. "—seven minutes."

"Hawkeye? The Black Widow?"

"On assignment elsewhere. Your friends are safe, Stark."

Tony sighed in relief, though he kept it off the suit speakers. There was one more thing, something that Hill was unlikely to find important in the chaos of this evening, but something that had unexpectedly haunted him since the helicarrier fell. 

"Did anyone remember to evacuate Captain America?" he asked. Tony was still haunted by his first view of the World War 2 hero on board the helicarrier, still imprisoned in a chunk of iceberg or pack-ice or glacier (he'd never thought to ask which.) Through the misty ice he'd still been able to see Cap's ridiculous but famous red white and blue uniform with the ludicrous little wings on his cowl.

He'd had his own problems at the time and his solution to them was probably the reason Fury had never followed up on his suggestion that Tony help them unfreeze him. Fury didn't appreciate being outsmarted by a cocky seventeen-year old smartass.

He'd seen the Captain only once since, after they'd actually unfrozen him. He'd been comatose even then, floating in a life support tank. Fury hadn't suggested Tony help to wake him that time.

And now Hill was staring at him with such an air of astonishment that his heart started beating so fast he had to remind himself that it really was undamaged. "We didn't get even half of the living out in time, Stark," she said, "let alone the brain dead."

 _Brain dead? No one said anything about the Captain being brain dead, just that they hadn't been able to wake him. He had certainly been alive in that tank. Is Hill lying?_ "He was alive," Tony pointed out stubbornly. "And helpless."

 _I bet she is lying. And, if so, there has to be a reason._ Though Tony couldn't have articulated why he believed this or why it was so important.

"No sign of cortical activity and minimal brain stem activity," Hill said now. "He was alive only in the technical sense."

 _If that was really true, why were you keeping him alive at all?_ Tony asked himself. He didn't want to believe the obvious answer: _The super-soldier serum in his veins. Wasn't much use to you frozen, was it?_

His disappointment in SHIELD was bitter, even if it was not unexpected after what they had done to the Living Laser. Trusting the organisation with anything important never worked out well, despite his Dad's faith in Fury.

But then his father said he was far too cynical for someone not even old enough to buy a drink. Not that that would stop him pouring himself a whisky when he returned home.

And his reluctance to speak was telling its own story.

"I think I'll just take a look myself," he said.

"Stark!" Hill snarled, but by then Iron Man was a streak of white light against the stars.

 

The helicarrier was lying on its side in the central channel of Long Island Sound. Someone was going to have to find a way to remove it – or possibly blow it up, and would they let him do that, did you suppose? – or shipping was going to be seriously impeded.

"Here goes nothing," Tony said to his suit computer as the unibeam picked out a hole where an engine had been torn away in the explosion.

He dived down into it, twisting onto his side so the orientation was less disturbing. The blueprints, scanned from his Dad's construction files, laid out his path.

Already, the interior was seriously spooky as the unibeam reflected from clouds of mud particles. He tried to treat it as some weird computer game, that should have made the occasional body floating in the water easier to deal with. When their guts weren't floating beside them, that was. _Would I have gotten points for retrieving the bodies?_ he wondered. _Or is there a time limit on the game?_

 _Stay goal oriented._ he chided himself as he dived through the hatch that led to the research decks.

_And here's a thought: why was Captain America's body being kept on the helicarrier and not at the Triskelion or one of the SHIELD research facilities?_

He thought he'd already worked out the answer to that, and it worried him. After what had happened to Bruce Banner, to Mallen and to far too many at Project X, you would have thought the government and their allies would have given up trying to create super-soldiers. But now they had a non-protesting means of obtaining the serum. Or had had.

Not that the serum was much use without the so-called 'vita-rays', whatever hid beneath that code name—

The hatchway to the lab was open.

Iron Man repulsored his way through it, and the unibeam illuminated the life support tank.

It was intact.

It was also empty.

_What the hell?_

Iron Man somersaulted and shot back through the hatch. 

 

It didn't take him long to discover how the super-soldier popsicle had left his little wet cell. Only a short distance beyond the lab he found a cluster of dead bodies and what looked like some kind of life support gurney, though it didn't have wheels. It also seemed to have collided with the wall, which might possibly have broken the dark-shaded half-cylinder top – though that shouldn't have caused that much damage – but would certainly not have torn the restraints apart.

Bracing himself, Tony went back to the bodies and examined them more carefully than was good for his digestion. All were in SHIELD agents' uniform, with med-tech coats flung over. One actually had a gun in his hand... except that hand dangled from a broken wrist and his head was at an unnatural angle.

There was no sign of Captain America's body.

Perhaps someone had hijacked it, which seemed unlikely because this was almost certainly what these guys were doing—

The alternative was even more unbelievable.

And if it were true.... if that was _true._

He powered up the repulsors, ready to leave in a hurry. But first...

The minibombs were new. One would easily destroy the whole laboratory section. A minute later, it did just that, but by then Iron Man was gone.

 

Once out of the water and into Iron Man's natural element, Tony took stock. He was faced with two immediate decisions: the first, whether to call in aid from SHIELD or Rescue, was the easy one. Even if whoever was in charge of SHIELD at the moment would believe him, and even if they could spare anyone to help, there was still the question about why they had been keeping Captain America alive and what they had been doing with the man. His fertile mind could not come up with any answer that put them in a good light. So, no, he couldn't trust them. And that also ruled out Rescue, because Pepper had wanted to be an agent of SHIELD since she had first encountered the organisation. Besides, he intended – if he could find him – to aid a fugitive who had killed, maybe in self-defence, maybe not. The law would have had something to say about that if Tony had left them any evidence: but he was interested in justice, not law.

A second question was more difficult: which bank of the Sound to search first?

If Captain America had really come back to himself, he might already be ashore. But the last time Tony had seen him, drawn to the lab by morbid curiosity, he had floated naked in the tank, unmoving, eyes closed, all his hair removed – though apparently the serum caused problems with that – attached to the life-support machines by a series of tubes that ventilated him, fed him, and removed bodily waste. The machines that measured his metabolism actually showed more animation, if not much.

Tony had first seen Cap in the ice while he himself was under sentence of death as a result of his encounter with Mallen, SHIELD's own super-soldier experiment gone wrong. After taking a tiny dose of Extremis himself, and becoming enhanced physically and mentally, he thought he understood a little of what the man had gone through.

That second time he'd reached out with his Extremis-enhanced mind and found... nothing save the dumbest of monitors and computer controlled feed lines.

There hadn't been an EEG, he remembered now. He should have noticed that.

_Not important._

_He's going to stick out like— Don't go there. I need to find him before SHIELD does, and before someone spots him and raises the alarm._

He ran the figures – which way the helicarrier's decks had been facing when she hit, the strength and direction of the waves generated, the state of the tide, the currents in the Sound – to estimate the Captain's likely position after the crash, then what someone with enhanced vision might see, and what reasoning they might employ. Then he headed for Long Island.

That that shore was the centre of SHIELD's search patterns, normally more heavily travelled and, therefore, naturally more dangerous, made him hurry.

His suit computer responded to his order, activating the infrared sensors, searching for a man – a super soldier – with an abnormally high body temperature.

It should be easy to find him. 

Finding him first was likely to be more problematic.

 

_Southern Shore, Long Island Sound. Wednesday, 10:20 pm._

By all logic, the fugitive knew, he ought to be heading into the city, where it would be possible for him to buy clothes – and shoes, he really needed shoes – and to find somewhere to hole up and consider his options.

But something, some impulse that he could not fight, drew him back to the shore, where a red and gold robot was falling from the sky, its eyes glowing white, as were the palms of its hands and the soles of its feet.

It should have frightened him more than anything else he had ever seen, yet he felt nothing but relief. And a need, not to hide, but to run towards the robot.

When the robot had landed facing him, only a few feet away, he still felt no fear. And when the face of the robot lifted away to reveal that of a man he was not surprised, and not surprised by what he could distinguish of that shadowed face, lit from below by the light glowing in the metal chest.

He did not recognise that face, but he did instinctively trust it.

"Cap?" the man in the metal suit asked. "Captain America?"

The voice brought a rush of relief sweeping through him, along with warmth and attraction. Not that any of those made sense.

He shook his head, not in negation but in puzzlement. "I don't know what you even mean..."

"We'll sort that out later. Meanwhile, let's get out of here." He was offered a metal covered arm, which locked around his waist and he was lifted up into a darkening sky, as clouds swept in to cover the stars and the sliver of moon.

They shot away over what turned out to be an island, and since the passing wind seared his skin and he had to turn his head to one side to breathe, he was able to catch glimpses of a great city's lights behind them. A short time later and they were heading straight for the side of a low mound, crowned by a glowing building. A hatchway irised open for them, and, perhaps twenty seconds later, they were settling on a pad in the middle of a huge room, brightly lit and full of ordered machinery, some of which he could actually recognise.

Except that the structure felt more futuristic in the way the armour-encased man and the giant flying aircraft carrier he had escaped had not. Around the walls stood other metal figures – other armours? – from a sleek black number that almost vanished in the dark of its alcove to a giant menacing construction that could destroy...

Well, anything?

_Why can't I remember?_

As soon as the metal arm released its grip, he leaped away, swinging to face the man in the strange armour, ready to do battle, but with a bone¬ deep assurance that it wouldn't be necessary.

The suit was already dismantling itself and flying into a semi-circular niche in the curving wall, where it reassembled and powered down, leaving its occupant standing on the dais, clad in a rumpled dress shirt and expensive black pants. 

It didn't startle him the way his surroundings had, which was odd, and the man in the suit was younger than he had somehow expected.

"Who the hell are you?" he demanded, trying to put a threat into his voice.

The man held up his hands, palms outwards. "Name's Tony – Tony Stark," he said in a calm, soothing voice. "They also call me 'Iron Man' though the armour isn't actually made of iron. I didn't choose the name. I know this is all very strange to you—"

"What is this place?"

"My armoury." It was said in a matter-of-fact tone, with perhaps just a hint of pride but none of aggression. The young man – Stark – was watching him with interest, and no trace of fear.

"It looks... extraordinary."

Stark laughed. "You should have seen the original. It was in a Makluan temple."

The word 'Makluan', uttered so casually by Stark, filled him with dread.

Stark must have seen something in his expression because he went on, "It was okay. Good cover. The Guardian it housed was defeated, the ring it protected now in other hands, though whether they are safe hands is... questionable." He shrugged.

_Am I supposed to know what that means? Does this man Stark know I've lost my memory? Or is this some sort of dream?_

And, suddenly, everything was out of focus, and there was a mist over his vision.

Hands – not his own – were holding him upright and Stark was asking him, urgently, if he was all right.

He concentrated hard on the voice, on the warm fingers gripping his arms, the strength that seemed to flow into him from them, the need...

"You're shivering and you're soaking wet," Stark pointed out. "If we go up to the house, you can shower and I'll find you some clothes and food. Do you think you can make it if I help you?"

"Of course I can. I'm good. Shower sounds great." Though it cost him effort, he pulled himself free of a dubious-looking Stark's grip. With a shrug, the other man led the way out of the circular room and into what was plainly a well-equipped workshop.

He had had every intention of following at Stark's heels, but, instead, was inexplicably drawn towards the workbenches.

"Cap!" Stark's voice said sharply. "This way!"

He was over by a newly opened sliding door, and his presence was almost as compelling as... 

_What the hell?_

"Sorry," he said and forced himself to step towards Stark. It was... difficult.

Three steps later everything greyed, and turned to black...

 

_Iron Man Armoury, Stark House, Long Island. Wednesday, 10:39pm_

Even though Tony's strength had been enhanced by Extremis he had had to call the armour in order to lift Cap and put him to bed in a guest suite in the mansion.

Standing looking down at him he wondered at the depth of his own emotional involvement. He'd known about Captain America, of course, and had felt a vague admiration for him during history lessons.

When he'd seen him in that block of ice he'd felt pity – and the reminder that a reputedly 4F guy had been subjected to a super-soldier process, cured of all his ills and transformed into human perfection had given him the idea that he might be able to cure himself using Extremis. 

Gratitude was natural.

But this wasn't admiration or gratitude; this was new and not immediately understandable.

As it was, once he had sent the armour back to its storage niche, he had to catch his breath before checking that all the guests had left, then initiating the house's security, specifically barring anyone even remotely connected with SHIELD from entering – except for his father, but there he had every intention of getting his story in first.

That would have to wait until morning, when he was sure Howard would give him every support...

 

_Stark House, Long Island. Thursday, 10.30 am_

"But Tony, what makes you so sure that this man is actually Captain America and not some muscular SHIELD agent?"

Tony looked at his father with what he suspected was an obvious air of disappointment. "He was bursting out of that SHIELD uniform, and he seemed confused," was all he could come up with.

"A SHIELD agent possibly with concussion, or pretending to have concussion," was Howard's response.

Tony hoped to hell he was kidding.

"You saw how fast he's healing and how quickly his hair is growing back," he pointed out. "You missed out a SHIELD agent with a shaved head, by the way."

"A SHIELD agent injected with the super-soldier serum or Extremis maybe."

Tony drew a shaky breath. "It's obvious you never someone with a full dose of Extremis," he said, as calmly as he could. "You also saw the video of what I found on the crashed helicarrier." He raised his voice in command. "Computer, compare the wartime photos of Steve Rogers with your scans of our guest. Any points of difference?"

"Facial features identical, height identical, muscle and weight twenty per cent below records."

Tony waggled his eyebrows at Howard. "You want me to take his fingerprints too? I daresay if they have records I can find them. Though I'd have to break into the Pentagon if they're on paper."

"A clone?" Howard's voice and expression was completely deadpan.

 _I'm being teased. Sent up,_ Tony realised. _But this is serious._

"Dad, really? You know the fingerprints of twins aren't identical and he's full-grown, adult, looks to be in his middle twenties. He speaks English with a slight Brooklyn accent. Rogers was born and grew up in Brooklyn. That would have to be not just a huge leap in cloning techniques but in forced growth and implanting. Computer!"

"There has not been the slightest hint of a breakthrough in those areas, sir." 

"So?" Tony glared at Howard.

"Just exploring the possibilities," his father said placatingly. "Tony, why are you so defensive about this man?"

Tony shrugged. He didn't understand that himself or why he was bristling at his father's challenges. Howard always challenged him: it was one of the reasons Tony adored him.

He said: "Cap obviously wasn't brain dead, despite Hill's claim. So why didn't SHIELD wake him up? They must have been keeping him unconscious. Why?"

"At a guess, the serum," Howard said.

"I was afraid you'd say that. It's what I figure too. Fucking vampires."

"He also collapsed in your workshop." Howard was suddenly looking grimmer than Tony had seen him since the Makluan invasion. "But if they were draining his blood and extracting the serum so that it was at low levels—"

"—it might have that effect. And the loss of body weight. In fact, it almost certainly would." The blaze of anger Tony felt was overwhelming. His heart was thumping wildly in his chest as he thought what it would be like to have Extremis drained from him.

He shuddered.

"We have to think it through, if we're going to protect him, whoever he is," Howard said. "Neither of us has qualifications in biology or medicine, but there are people who could help.

"But can we trust any of them?" Tony shot back. "We certainly can't trust anyone allied with SHIELD."

Howard winced, but did not argue. "Bruce?" he suggested.

"Does Bruce Banner still exist? I haven't heard anything of him since the Hulk went gray and intelligent. I've tried to contact Rick, but he's gone dark too, even though Ross is supposedly in jail."

"Hank Pym," Howard decided. "He's one of the world's foremost biochemists. I trust him."

Tony was surprised. "Do you know him? I've sold stuff to his company but only through his management and research staff."

"Probably a good thing. I don't think he has much time for wunderkind. Ow!" Howard added as Tony poked him with his elbow. "He's reclusive and can be touchy. But your mother was friends with his wife. She was called Maria too," he added. As always, there was sadness in his voice when he spoke of Tony's mother. "I'll go through Jan Van Dyne."

Rumour had it that Janet Van Dyne, who had inherited a fortune when she was a couple of years older than Tony, was dating Dr Henry Pym and had taken him firmly in hand.

"She's nice," Tony said. "Thanks, Dad."

"Maybe I should let you try to persuade Hank to help," Howard said reflectively. "That encounter might knock some of that over-confidence out of you."

Tony chuckled. "Like father, like son?" Then, with genuine curiosity, "Was that why you insisted Roberta send me to the Tomorrow Academy?"

"Partly." Howard gave an exaggerated sigh. "Didn't work."

"Let's—"

"Sirs," the computer interrupted, "our guest is awake."

 

_Guest rooms, Stark House. Thursday, 10:45am._

He woke instantaneously, all his senses alert, aware that the room was empty – he could not hear any breathing – but that he was warm and comfortable, naked between soft sheets.

Stark must have put him to bed after he'd passed out.

Searching his memory, he could recall nothing before he had broken free of his bonds on the ridiculous flying... ship? Aircraft carrier? Why would you need aircraft if you had a flying battleship anyway?

His disappointment at his continuing lack of memory was shocking. Had he somehow expected to recover memory while he slept? If so, it hadn't happened, though every moment since he had woken in restraints was pin sharp.

Carefully, he pushed himself into a sitting position, then swung his feet out of bed and stood up, surprised by a lack of dizziness. Looking about him, he noticed for the first time that the room was large and tastefully decorated but, apart from the art on the walls – which he was scared to examine too closely because he recognised some of the artists and the works looked to be originals – it didn't have a lot of personality. Maybe it was a high class hotel room. What he needed right now was the bathroom, so he hoped that that was somewhere close.

It turned out to be attached and more luxurious than he would have believed possible. It was not until he had been standing under a hot shower for a good ten minutes that it occurred to him that the experience should be more painful than blissful. A check revealed that last night's burns and bruises were now no more than colourful patches, impervious to both water and probing fingers. And, where his scalp and chin had felt smooth the night before, there was now a thick stubble of hair, which the mirrors showed to be blond.

"But how long could I have I slept?" he asked himself.

"You have been asleep for eleven hours and six minutes, sir," a female voice said from the air.

He whirled, checking every inch of the room, ready to fight, but there was nothing to fight against. "Where are you?" he demanded.

"Many places. I am Iron Man's computer," the voice explained. "This version of me runs the armoury and the house."

"Do you have a name?"

"I do not need a name. You may address me as 'Computer.'"

That was strange, because he had been expecting a name. Perhaps even anticipating one. But he still did not know which name or even how he knew what that this was the voice of a machine.

A search produced a wrapped safety razor and a tube that labelled itself as 'shaving foam', so he shaved his chin, but left the stubble on his scalp alone. He didn't see any reason to be unnaturally bald.

So why had his head been shaved?

Clothes had been laid out on a chair next to the bed; white boxers, a soft blue button-down shirt, grey chinos and black sneakers and socks. To his astonishment, they all fitted perfectly.

_Well, time to find out if I'm locked in here._

 

The outer door opened at a touch, leading into a curving corridor lit from high windows. Five other doors were closed, but at the end of the passage he found himself the head of a flight of stairs – and caught his breath at the vast curve of a twenty-foot high window-wall looking out over what was presumably last night's estuary. This bank stretched away on his left to the towers of a city peeking over the horizon. The room below filled most of the floor, and was, at the moment, empty of life. But he could smell bacon cooking.

He clattered down the stairs, deliberately making noise. By the time he reached the foot, Tony Stark was waiting for him, in black jeans and a red t-shirt, looking incredibly handsome, ridiculously young, and totally... edible. 

The shock of sexual desire which shot straight to stomach and groin was unexpected – and unacceptable.

_What the hell?_

"Hi, Cap," Stark said, looking at him... appreciatively? He also seemed nervous. "Care for some brunch?"

Until that moment, he hadn't realised just how hungry he was. He bit back his immediate response and said, instead, "Look, I'm grateful, but I— Do we know each other? Are we friends?” _Lovers?_ "You're... " _Sorta absurdly familiar._

Stark seemed taken aback for a few seconds. "No, no. I mean, I know your rep, obviously and it's one hell of a rep. You'd better brace yourself, Cap, because this will come as a shock. The war was over close to seventy years ago." He paused, plainly expecting a reaction. "Don't you believe me?"

"Why shouldn't I?"

"Because you've been well, asleep, sorta," he said.

"Well, yes. I guess you put me to bed. Thank you. It was kind—"

"No, no, before that," Stark interrupted. "Frozen sleep. Remember when you crashed into the ice? The serum kept you alive. For seventy years. You're in the early part of the twenty-first century. That's why the tech is more advanced than you remember it—"

There was only one way to cut through this babble. "No."

"No? The tech isn't more advanced? Was Hydra really that far ahead? Or you don't remember crashing into the ice?" Stark's eyes had narrowed to thin slits of blue. There was an intelligence there that ought to have been frightening, but somehow wasn't.

It was a vast relief to admit the truth. "No, I don't even remember my name."

Stark nodded, as if that confirmed what he had suspected. "It's Rogers," he said. "Steven Rogers. Steve."

"You keep calling me something else."

"Do I? Oh, yeah. 'Cap'. I've read too many comic books, I guess. You were Captain Steve Rogers – Captain America."

"You're not making sense, Stark."

One dark eyebrow went up. "Is there anything I could say that would make sense right now?"

He conceded the point to Stark, unable to do anything but shake his head. Then, "Food?" he reminded Stark who grinned, looking even younger. 

_How old is he, anyway? There are moments when he looks like he should be in college or even high school, but no kid that young would or should have been flying around in a metal suit. Besides, his self-confidence is that of a much older man, even if the beard is sketchy._

He'd get the answers later. Meanwhile, he followed Stark into a large kitchen that looked more like a mad scientist's laboratory, where an older man – not that he was old – was sliding fried eggs onto plates that already contained bacon and hash browns. 

"This is my Dad, Howard Stark," Tony said, his voice full of pride. "He's head of Stark International and one of the world's greatest and most innovative engineers."

Steve – it was good to have a name, and one he quite liked, even if he didn't recognise it – saw the resemblance at once. They had the same regular, handsome features and the same vivid blue eyes. Howard's hair was a shade or two lighter and he wore a neat hairline moustache, while Tony was a couple of inches taller, with wider shoulders and more muscle, but both were slim, graceful and elegant.

And yet there was a flicker of warning in Steve's mind as he met Howard's eyes, however honest his gaze.

"Sit down, Capta—." He broke off as Tony shook his head at him, but continued smoothly. "Coffee? Orange juice?"

"Both, thank you."

"Tony?"

"Ahead of you, Dad." 

Howard waved Steve to a stool at the breakfast bar. Tony put a glass of orange juice in front of him and asked how he liked his coffee...

He didn't have an answer.

He'd recognised the work of named artists from a distance, but he didn't know how he liked his coffee. It was desperately unsettling.

Tony's expression was troubled but he merely said. "I'll bring you some black coffee and sugar and cream separately so you can experiment," and was back within thirty seconds with just that, while Howard served him with a plate heaped with what turned out to be very tasty food.

When he finally had eaten enough to take his time experimenting, he discovered he liked his coffee with a spoon of sugar and a dash of cream, and made a note to remember it. At least, he hoped that he'd remember it.

Howard, meanwhile, was frowning at Tony. "Is that a triple espresso you're drinking, Anthony?"

Tony widened his eyes at him. "I'm all grown up now, Dad," he pointed out. "You don't get to regulate my caffeine intake."

Howard's lips tightened in an obvious attempt to keep his response internal, and it was in that awkward pause that the computer's voice entered the conversation. "Rescue is approaching the armoury."

"Fuck," Tony said. 

_He has to be 'Tony' now. It feels right._

Howard's brows furrowed as he frowned at his son. He opened his mouth as if to say something – probably a rebuke for his language – but plainly thought better of it. What he said in the end was, "Are you going to bring her in on this?"

Tony was on his feet. "For God's sake, Dad," he said, around a slice of toast. "She thinks the sun shines out of Fury's ass and she's already applied to be a SHIELD agent when she finishes college. She won't believe what we suspect they were doing with Cap, so even if we swear her to secrecy, we can't trust her not to let it slip to SHIELD because she _trusts_ them."

"A 'no' then," Howard interpreted.

"Computer, amendment to my previous order. The house and armoury are to be secured at all entry points. Free movement only to me, Dad and Captain Rogers," Tony ordered as he hurried toward the doorway. He paused in it and looked back. "Dad, look after Cap – Steve – for me, would you? He's lost his memory of everything before he went into the ice. Even his name. Fill him in as much as you can. I'll be back as soon as I can get rid of Pep without making her suspicious."

"Anthony!" Howard said sharply. "You don't 'get rid' of Pepper. You talk to her, find out what she wants, and, if she wants you to take her to see Fury or Hill, you do just that. You act normally, get it?"

Tony halted, though he did not turn. He appeared to be hyperventilating from the way his shoulders were rising and falling. "Yeah." He bit out the words. "Okay. Take care of Steve."

"You bet, kiddo."

Tony took a final deep breath, squared his shoulders and marched onwards.

Howard, Steve noted, was watching him with a fond smile, though his comment, as his son disappeared, was a muttered, "Good luck with that." 

There were any number of things about Tony's diatribe that needed explaining but, oddly, the one thing at the top of Steve's list was, "Rescue? Pepper?"

"Tony made battle armour for his friends. Including his girlfriend, Patricia Potts, usually known as Pepper. 'Rescue' is her code name."

Tony hadn't spoken about this woman – whether as Rescue or Patricia or Pepper – as if she was his girlfriend. 

_Not that that matters._

Except it did, though he did not know why.

Howard was smiling at him. "It would be a lot to take in, even if you hadn't lost your memory – temporarily, almost certainly."

It was meant to be reassuring. Which was kind but not helpful.

"Shall I give you the grand tour?" the elder Stark went on. "Let you have time to process?"

He wasn't sure he was ever going to come to terms with any of this, but he said, "Yes, thank you, sir," automatically.

"Howard," the other man corrected.

"Howard, I'd like that." He made a quick and simple decision. "I guess you'd better call me 'Steve'." It was most acceptable of the names he had been offered.

Howard held out his hand. His grip was firm with no attempt to dominate. "Welcome home, Steve."

 

_Iron Man Armoury, Stark House, Long Island. Thursday, 12:40pm._

Tony, mindful of his father's all too obviously sensible instruction, plastered a cheerful look on his face as the doors of the elevator opened onto the workshop in the armoury. Pepper was still in the Rescue armour, but with the faceplate up and the gauntlets off. Her own cheerful expression was, he was sure, totally unforced.

 _I don't want to be here._ It was a revelation.

"Hi, Pep," he greeted. 

"Oh, Tony," she said, without turning, "what _is_ this thing? Is it Makluan? What does it do?"

It was only then that Tony realised that she was in the process of reaching for the Gene's artefact—

"Don't touch that!" he shouted, running forward.

Pepper, as ever, ignored him. She grasped the artefact in her bare hands, lifting it from the bench and turning as she squinted at it.

"Put it down." Tony slammed his arm across both of Pepper's, using his Extremis enhanced strength to knock them down onto the bench top, sending the device rolling from her hands.

"Ow! That hurt! What the hell is wrong with you, Tony?"

"That thing is still under examination. We don't know who made it or what it does," Tony snapped, though even as he spoke he was wondering why it had had no effect on Pepper.

_But then it had no effect on Gene, either. According to him._

"When I tell you not to touch something, you don't touch it!" Tony yelled. He had to shove his hands in his pockets to stop himself hitting Pepper – and when had he wanted to hit any of his friends? Leave alone Pep?

_What is happening to me?_

"Who do you think you are, telling me what to do?" Pepper yelled back. "You're insufferable, Tony Stark."

"Maybe, but I'm right. If you're going to act like this you'll be barred from the armoury unless I'm here."

 _Well, it would be a good excuse to keep her away from Cap._

Pepper looked as if she was going to cry and that brought Tony's first wince. _She doesn't deserve this,_ he reminded himself, but somehow it didn't really matter.

In his pockets, he clenched his fists so hard that his nails dug into the palms. The pain helped.

"Why are you here?" he asked in as near a normal voice as he could manage.

"I got a call from Deputy Director Hill. She said you weren't answering your cell. And General Fury wants to see yo— us. Now."

"I could care less about what Fury wants," Tony said, but he had noted the correction.

_Dad was right._

"Please, Tony," Pepper said, her eyes seeming about four times their normal size.

_How does she do that?_

"Pretty please. I need to keep him sweet for when I make my application to join SHIELD."

As if Fury would reject someone with their very own battle armour.

"Okay." Reluctantly, Tony reached out with Extremis and called the Iron Man suit. "I take it you know where El Furioso is?"

Pepper nodded, though she was still looking at him as if he had grown a second head. Perhaps the Van Dyke was coming in faster and thicker than he believed.

_Nope. Didn't think so. I'll have to cool it or I really will make her suspicious._

"Then let's go." He hoped they could get this over with as quickly as possible because though he trusted his Dad, he didn't want to leave Steve in anyone else's hands.

 

_Stark House, Long Island Sound. Thursday, 12:50pm._

Howard ended his tour – which Steve noted did not include the 'armoury' – on the long, wide balcony that swept around three quarters of the house – mansion – with a whole panorama of city skyscrapers, river estuary, and islands laid out in front of them. On a clearer day he supposed they might even be able to see the ocean – the 'Atlantic' according to Howard.

Steve guessed that Howard was hoping that the sight might jog a memory, but apart from the growing feeling of dislocation, of a world just a little out of kilter, there was nothing. 

Howard was pointing out major features – they were apparently on something called Long Island, which seemed appropriate as he couldn't see either end, and the city was New York – the name sounded vaguely familiar but there was nothing attached to it in his memory – when Iron Man appeared below them, soaring up into sky in a great curve over the wide iron-grey Sound, with a second figure, purple and silver instead of red and gold, at his flank.

"I suppose that's Rescue," Steve said, as neutrally as he could.

"Yes."

"She any good at being a superhero?"

"She alternates between being brilliant and frighteningly rash," Howard said. "She makes Tony look cautious."

"You must be very proud of your son."

Howard sighed, and leaned against the balcony rail. "Yes. Of course. He's a genius. When he was seventeen he founded his own company and now is worth a billion in his own right. He's saved this city and the whole world. He took down supervillains and aliens and the two men who stole our company, all before he was eighteen. But he has maybe three friends of his own age in the world and that is my fault."

"I doubt it," Steve said. "Seems to me that the boy you describe would be more at home with adults – and highly intelligent adults at that – than with your average kid in high school."

"You can't call Pepper or Jim Rhodes average," Howard said. "And couldn't even before they went to college. I'm not sure Happy Hogan is either. Wait until you meet them."

_I get the impression that Tony doesn't want me to meet them. I wonder why, if they're all so close._

"What's that?" Steve pointed to a flash of red and gold. Though it was only moments since Iron Man had vanished into a bank of cloud, he was now, impossibly, standing on the drive below the house. The figure beside him wore battleship grey armour, festooned with weapons. "We just saw Tony – Iron Man – leave. And that isn't the Rescue armour, surely?"

"No. It's War Machine. But Jim Rhodes, who pilots it, is in Colorado. He has a pass for next weekend from the Air Force Academy but today he isn't due back until tomorrow. Besides, Tony and Jim would have flown directly into the armoury. Stay here, Steve. Don't get involved." He turned and strode back through the doors, breaking into a run as he headed for the stairs.

 _Doesn't want to get trapped in the elevator,_ Steve noted. _Guessed he was smart._

_Maybe I'm not._

"Computer?" he said. "Can you give me a report on the possible security breach."

There was no reply.

"Then let me talk to Howard. Howard?"

There was still no response.

_Okay._

Steve leaned over the balcony, assessing what lay below.

The house sat on a mound that looked almost artificial, which Steve guessed held Tony's armoury. Iron Man and War Machine, or whoever they actually were, had vanished.

Almost before he had time to decide on a plan, Steve was swinging over the balcony rails. He dropped the thirty feet to the terrace above the drive that curved up the mound, rolling on impact and coming to his feet already into the first stride of a dead run, jumping the terrace balustrade and pounding up the drive towards – he hoped – an entrance to the house or armoury.

What he found was instead was a garage, its armoured doors blasted from their hinges. The first thing he saw was a blonde woman sprawled on the floor, a golden facemask a few inches from her outstretched hand. Howard was running from parked vehicle to parked vehicle, occasionally firing blasts from an odd looking gun and dodging what looked like electrical discharges – lightning – flaring from the hands of what might be a humanoid robot or yet another man in armour – steel grey, this time.

_Surely that would be a more appropriate colour for 'Iron' Man?_

Though he somehow couldn't see Tony Stark choosing to wear a forest green tunic and a hooded cloak.

 _Who the hell is this guy? Big Green Riding Hood?_ He knew that wasn't the right name, but it seemed appropriate.

Furthermore, there was no sign of Iron Man or War Machine.

Howard's next shot hit dead centre on the Big Green Riding Hood's chest, but it didn't even seem to stagger him. 

"Kneel before Doom!" the robot, or whatever it was, boomed, reaching out one handed, hooking the steel gauntlet underneath the edge of a sleek sports car and, without effort, sending the vehicle rolling towards Howard, who scuttled away. The sports car hit what looked like a super-charged sports wagon, in a thunder of crushing bodywork.

Glass and metal flew in all directions. A wheel bounced towards Steve. Without thought, he shifted position, scooped it from the air and hurled it at the armoured figure, which raised a hand and blasted it to its component atoms.

_That's too slow to be electricity. Unknown force, then._

But gasoline was gushing onto the concrete floor.

_If a spark falls into that—_

Steve charged the armoured figure, which moved with surprising speed, and this time the blasts were aimed at him. He dodged, closed, and kicked up at the armoured face. All that happened was that the robot took a step backwards, but at least it was focused on him now, and not at Howard, or the crashed cars.

_Weak points in that armour? Looks like the neck, maybe the joints._

Steve kicked at the knee, then the shoulder, trying to topple the robot which caught his ankle in mid-kick and hurled him towards the wrecked vehicles. Twisting in the air, he landed close enough to Howard to tell him, "Get out of here. I'll distract whoever-he-is, then deal with him."

Howard grinned at him, making no move to follow his order. "He's a robot that thinks it isn't. All of them think they're Von Doo– wait, Whitney's coming round! Don't let her get the mask!"

If Howard thought that was more important than saving him from the robot then—

Steve flung himself across the floor, sliding so his feet hit the mask first, knocking it flying. The girl – Whitney? – ignored him and scrambled after it. But Steve was on his feet before she was, leaping between her and the mask. She snarled and, moving with equal speed, feinted towards his face with her fist but kicked out at his groin. He caught her foot and threw her backward, then winced as her head impact on the wheel arch of one of the cars. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Howard throw the mask so it was hidden from view behind the crashed cars.

But now Big Green Riding Hood had risen to his feet.

"Howard! The gun!" Steve held up his hand and the weapon came flying through the air, his hand closing on it as he somersaulted over the robot's blast, twisted in midair, bounced off a car hood and made his final leap towards the green-cloaked robot. Landing on its shoulders, he hooked his feet round its neck, reached around and thrust the barrel of the gun into the right eye slit and pulled the trigger.

The thing howled. "Doom is invincible! You cannot kill Doom!" even as the blast exploded out of the left side of its jaw. Steve twisted the barrel so it was pointing upwards and fired another long blast.

The smell of burning plastic and wire almost overwhelmed the smell of gasoline, then the robot collapsed under him.

Steve jumped clear.

Howard was bending over the blonde woman. Now he felt in his pocket, produced some sort of restraining device and secured the woman's wrists and ankles. He met Steve's eyes and smiled. "Well," he drawled, "remind me not to doubt my son. Thanks, Captain."

Steve put his hands on his knees and leant his weight on them. He took time to catch his breath. "Who the hell are these people? And why were they trying to break in here?"

"The girl is Whitney Stane. Madame Masque. The mask allows her to disguise herself as anything or anyone, but it has also affected her mind. She escaped from SHIELD custody over a year ago. The Doombot is a substitute for its creator, almost identical and also capable of disguising itself. It was the one that flew them in, as Whitney can't – fly, that is. Victor Von Doom was the ruler of Latveria – a genius capable of inventing such a thing. He's also dead."

"Are you telling me he dressed like that?" It was a silly point to hone in on, but Steve wasn't sure he believed the rest of it.

"Yeah."

_It could have been a man. I could have killed a foreign ruler. Except he's already dead._

Steve shook his head helplessly. "This... is all... so damn... weird."

Howard put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed. "Yeah. I know. Welcome to the twenty-first century, Steve."

 

_SHIELD Local Office, New York City. Thursday, 13:05pm_

Fury had taken over the tiny office of the New York SHIELD co-ordinator. The whole operation, which normally had around thirty staff, was now accommodating a couple of hundred, all busy yelling into their phones or tapping frantically on the screens of their smart phones.

Which Tony was accessing with Extremis right at that moment, brushing aside protection and firewalls. At his side, Rescue, who was practically jumping up and down with excitement, raised her faceplate.

"What the hell happened to my helicarrier, Stark?" Fury demanded, raising his voice to be heard above the din.

"It appeared to explode," Tony said, his mind only half on the conversation.

_There. That's definitely... interesting._

"And crash," he went on blithely, saving the 'interesting' email and following up the sender. "Dad and I saw it from the house. I came to help but all I could do was fish a few live people and a lot of dead bodies out of Long Island Sound." He spread his hands. "That's all."

"The arc reactor exploded. An accident you assured me couldn't happen," Fury said.

"I said it was theoretically impossible for an arc reactor to fail or run wild by accident," Tony corrected him. He paused, letting the silence linger in what was possibly the vain hope of disconcerting Fury. "But this wasn't an accident, was it?"

"You think it wasn't?"

"I'm sure it wasn't."

Fury glared at him. "Damn it, Stark, lose the faceplate. I want to see who I'm talking to."

Tony hadn't wanted him to see the telltale changes in his eyes that meant he was accessing machines with Extremis. But now he had the lead he wanted, and a whole lot of that promising information downloaded, he needed just a few more seconds...

"Say the magic word," he suggested.

Fury rolled his eye and ignored that. "Hill says you went looking for Captain America, even after she told you he was as good as dead."

Tony inclined his head, because it didn't seem like that was actually a question.

"So that was where you vanished to!" Pepper exclaimed. "Did you find him?"

Tony shook his head. "That whole section of the helicarrier had been destroyed," he said.

_By me, actually. Post his escape. But you don't need to know that._

"Guess if he wasn't dead before, he sure is now," he added.

"Harsh, Stark." Fury's one eye glared assessingly at Tony, who finally retracted the faceplate so he could return it with interest and a shit-eating grin. His own eyes, he knew, would be back to their normal blue.

"Thought you appreciated 'harsh', General."

Fury ignored that, probably as too patently obvious. "You gonna help us recover the body?" he wanted to know.

Tony's anger was surging, so hard that he knew he wasn't able to contain it for long. "You think there'll be anything left of it?" he snarled. "Still hoping to harvest the super-soldier serum, Nick? Didn't you get enough from your zombie corpse?"

Behind him, he heard Pepper squeak. The idea was, it appeared, shockingly new to her.

Fury, however, merely shrugged. "You'd have done the same if we'd actually let you into that lab again. So would your friend Banner."

Tony's breath caught in his throat. He imagined Bruce – intelligent, cautious, his shoulders' hunched, hair unkempt, eyes haunted behind his spectacles – and shook his head. He was trembling as he tried to contain his anger on behalf of his friend.

"Stark, your reactor destroyed my helicarrier." The 'what are you gonna do about it?' was left unspoken.

"What? You weren't insured?" Tony feigned astonishment.

It was at that moment that Pepper kicked his ankle, which he wouldn't have been able to feel if she hadn't been wearing armour too. As it was, the noise made all three of them jump and every person in the office look up from their phones. It was only then that Tony realised that the room had been silent for some time as everyone listened to their conversation.

"You installed that reactor," Fury pointed out.

"And it passed every test. No other arc reactor has shown any sign of instability. Still looks like sabotage to me, Fury, which is your expertise."

"Why so hostile, Tony? We're going to crawl all over that downed helicarrier. But it'll be easier and safer for you to get what I want from the wreckage."

_Not fucking likely,_ Tony thought. What he said was, "Sorry, Nick, I have more important work."

"You also have a contract."

"As a consultant. Technical consultant. Same as Dad did. And with the helicarrier at the bottom of the Sound I can't be held to repair or upgrade it."

"We can test that in court," Fury pointed out. 

"Do that. Oh, and I resign." Tony said. "Yes, I know there's a penalty. I actually read contracts before I sign them. The money's already on its way to SHIELD's account."

"I can explore the helicarrier for you, General," Rescue piped up.

"Then do it," Tony said and triggered the boot jets. His exit scattered agents, papers and tech to the four winds.

He was relieved when Rescue did not try to follow him.

 

_Stark House, Long Island. Thursday, 13:34pm_

As he headed for the entrance to the armoury, Tony's eye was caught by the open garage doors. He diverted and, on landing, looked in horror at the wreckage of at least four of the cars, including his favourite Ferrari Spider. More than that, there were bullet holes in the walls.

He could see no sign of life. "Computer! Are Dad and Steve all right?"

"They are uninjured," the computer told him.

"Thank God!" Sending his armour back to its niche in the Armoury, but keeping one of the gauntlets, with its palm repulsor, in place, Tony hurried into the house.

He found Steve and Howard sitting opposite each other on matching sofas, a bottle of whisky on the coffee table between them, tumblers cradled in their hands.

They looked at him with identical expressions of apprehension touched with guilt.

"What happened in the garage?" Tony demanded.

"We got a visit from a Doombot and Madame Masque," his father answered. "Don't worry, we took care of them."

Tony's panic only increased. "Whitney was here? What happened to her mask? If she has access to it she'll—?"

"We destroyed it," Steve said. "Or rather, Howard did. That gun is some weapon."

"And Whitney?"

"On her way to a private clinic, with high security. I owe Obadiah that much," Howard said. "Not to mention that she originally stole the mask from my vault. They'll report on whether she says anything but right now she seems to be in shock."

"She's linked to the mask," Tony reminded him. "It had taken over her mind. But a Doombot? Really? I didn't know any of them had survived the Latverian uprising."

"Or how Madame Masque had gotten hold of one?" Howard asked.

"Last time I saw her, she was in SHIELD custody," Tony said defensively. "Though they didn't hold onto her for more than five minutes."

"So she's managed to avoid recapture since," Steve said. "But why did she try to break in here?"

Tony winced. "Whitney wants to kill my Dad, because she blames me for what happened to her Dad, who's sorta in the same state you were twenty four hours ago. She thinks that would be the best revenge on me."

Howard was unconcerned. "That doesn't explain the Doombot. Or that they tried to get in here without alerting us."

"Tony then, or his armours," Steve said quietly.

"Or you." Tony could hear the fear in his own voice and, remotely, wondered at it.

"That's just crazy. Why would they want me?"

It was obviously a sincere question and deserved a truthful answer. "The super-soldier serum in your blood."

Steve looked up the heavens as if in supplication. "I don't know what in... heck... you are talking about. This gets crazier by the minute."

"Set that aside for the moment," Howard said. "We will explain, I promise. I don't think they're after Steve, Tony. Unless someone outside this room knows he's here. As I understand it, the Doombots have a measure of independent intelligence, plus Doom's ego. Its creator tried to steal your tech before, so maybe it remembered. Meanwhile, what about Fury?"

"He wants me to search for Cap's body." Tony felt another rush of panic. "And, Dad, he's trying to put the blame for the destruction of the helicarrier on us, on the arc reactor."

"I'll get Roberta on that, and then I'll talk to him," Howard said calmly. "He's not going to succeed in bullying either of us, Tony. He needs us too much."

Steve's brows had drawn together. "He was the one who was keeping me prisoner?"

"Yes," Tony said.

"He would say that his people rescued you and were keeping you alive," Howard said at the same moment.

It took Tony a second or so to see the implications of that. "So you're now ready to admit that Steve really is Captain America?"

"I've seen him fight," Howard said. "That was evidence enough."

Tony looked at Steve with growing hope. 

_Does he remember? Has anything come back? Even just that he's Captain America?_

Steve shrugged. "You're making too much of it," he told Howard. "Anyone could have—"

But Howard was shaking his head. "No normal human can move that fast, or is that strong."

"I— it was just instinct," Steve protested.

"More likely muscle memory," Tony said.

"I don't know." Howard was frowning. "Some of those moves..." He shook his head. "I don't suppose Steve remembers where and how he learned to fight using techniques that didn't really impact on the west until the 1960s."

"There are some videos on the Net of Cap dating back to World War 2," Tony said. "Maybe he used those moves then. He fought with some pretty weird people." He grinned at Steve. "We ought to show them to you anyway. Maybe jog your memory. At least you'll know why we're so excited at finding you're still alive." 

"Damn right you'll show them to me," Steve snapped, each word bitten out in controlled anger, a voice of command. "I want to know everything. What you know of my – of Captain America's past, about SHIELD, about Fury, about this Doom character. I need to know what I'm in the middle of here."

Tony felt the ground begin to drop away beneath his feet. "Steve—"

"That's reasonable," Howard said. "Tony'll show you how to use the computer databases, and he'll also hack anything from the Pentagon that isn't in the public domain. Do be careful though, Tony. I can't fit prison visits into my schedule. I'll brief you about SHIELD myself, Steve. I have an unfortunately close connection with it that I expect I'm going to regret even more than I do now."

 

_Stark House, Long Island. Thursday, 14:20pm_

Steve watched the scratched and flickering footage with an expression of disbelief. "Okay," he said. "I admit that guy looks a bit like me, but what he's doing with that... that discus—"

"It's a shield," Tony said, torn between amusement and disappointment. "Made from a vibranium alloy."

Steve scowled. "Vibranium. That's damn rare."

"Yeah. Only source is Wakanda and that wasn't even known until—" Tony stopped in mid flow, because Wakanda hadn't been revealed to the world until a few years ago and – vibranium? When had that been known, been given that name? Had it been when the shield had been forged? And had Cap ever been told what his shield was composed of? "Do you remember vibranium and Wakanda?" he asked cautiously.

"When you said 'vibranium' I knew it was a purple-tinted silver metal with some unique properties, and when you said, 'Wakanda'..." He hesitated. "I take it that's a country, but... it scares me and reassures me all at once."

"Its king certainly would do both."

"Anthony." Both of them jumped at Howard's voice. "I need a word with you in private. Steve, I'll be back in a few minutes. Meanwhile, can you manage on your own?"

"Sure." Steve turned back to the screen with an expression that suggested nothing so much as morbid curiosity, while Howard took Tony's arm and hustled him out of the room.

"Virgil Potts just called me," he said, once they were out of Steve's hearing. "He wants to know what you did to Pepper."

"I haven't done anything to Pepper." Tony was instinctively defensive. "I left her with Fury. She's going to look for Cap's body for him." He was trying to sound as if he didn't care about this betrayal (except Pepper had no way of knowing it was betrayal) but was pretty sure Howard was aware of the deception. "Which reminds me, we need to cancel this movie party."

Howard sighed. "That is not going to make your friends less suspicious, Tony."

"We can't take the chance that they see Cap and start asking questions."

"Then you had better think up a damn good excuse that isn't going to cost you your friends," Howard snapped back. "Meanwhile, ring Agent Potts."

"Yes, sir," Tony said miserably, wishing that Howard didn't make him feel ten again.

"Now, Anthony."

"Okay, but there's something I have to deal with – something I saw with Extremis when I was in Fury's office. Could you...?"

"Make your excuses to Steve? Of course."

"Keep him safe," Tony corrected, heading for the elevator to the armoury.

"Stay safe yourself, son."

"And out of jail. Yeah, I know. Must keep your schedule free, Dad." Tony flashed a smile at him and accelerated into a jog.

Howard shook his head after him and went back to join Steve.

 

_2,000 feet above Pennsylvania. Thursday, 2:44pm._

Tony called Virgil Potts from inside the stealth armour, which did not make him feel any safer or less acutely nervous.

"Mr Potts, it's Tony Stark. Dad said you wanted to talk to me."

"Tony, have you dumped Patricia?"

For a second, the bluntness of the question shook Tony's composure. "What?" Then he gathered enough wit to respond, "No, sir, I haven't." 

But then... maybe he hadn't been on the same page as Pepper for a while. "I couldn't anyway. We're not actually dating." He had to fight to stop himself adding something about, "On your orders." It wasn't fair, anyway. He had been kinda relieved by Virgil's suggestion.

Virgil made a startled noise, as if he was taken aback by this. For a moment Tony wondered if he'd actually said the addition aloud. But, "That's not how Patricia sees it," was what her father said.

_Ooops. Maybe I should have paid more attention to her voicemail messages._

Tony sighed. "Yesterday was only the third time I'd seen her in the last year," he pointed out. "She's still one of my best friends but... we never had much more than that."

"Next you'll be saying that it's not her but you," Virgil said dryly.

"And maybe that would be true, sir. I'm sorry. All the same, I didn't do anything that could be taken as dumping her. Not without a lot of imagination."

"Which she has," Virgil pointed out.

Tony began to feel panicked. "General Fury was using her to enlist my co-operation," he said. "If he only wants her for that, she's better off leaving SHIELD now. Though I certainly want a recording of what happens when she confronts him about it."

For the first time, there was the hint of a laugh in Virgil Potts' voice: "You and me both, son. So she's still on the Iron Man team?"

"Of course, sir. I wouldn't take that away from her." 

_She'd kill me._

He had a feeling that Virgil was thinking much the same thing because he only said, "I'll tell her she hasn't been dumped but I'll leave you to tell her why," and rang off.

Tony dismissed both of them from his mind and poured on the power. Oddly, though he wasn't in the least scared of his next objective, he was increasingly nervous.

 

_2,000 feet above Washington DC, Thursday, 3:15pm_

Washington was overhung with low clouds emitting heavy drizzle. From Tony's view was useful as it meant that few people were looking up at the sky. Furthermore, the rain wasn't heavy enough for its displacement around the stealth armour to be noticeable. He should be perfectly invisible. Nor did he need to get inside the Triskelion, SHIELD's Washington base. Instead, he trusted to his improved stealth tech and hovered a few hundred yards from the perimeter before reaching out with Extremis. Once he's made contact with the servers he flicked through machine designations, dismissing cell phones and laptops until he discovered the personnel database.

Doctor Morganti's home address was in eastern Pennsylvania, and the code for her workplace led to a SHIELD research station based – oh, this was interesting – in a pharmaceutical laboratory now mainly occupied by biochemists from Culver University.

_Well, well. Needs investigating. And no time like the present._

 

_SHIELD Research Station, Maryland. Thursday, 3.49 pm._

The lab buildings were unremarkable, screened from the local road by trees, but far more extensive than Tony had expected.

It turned out to be easy, again using Extremis, to isolate those labs being used by SHIELD. Then, this time using the personnel department (one overworked clerk who doubled as the building manager and a small PC) plus the internal network directory, it was just as simple to trace Dr Paula Morganti and her small, high-powered team to a particular building.

"Computer, scan for refrigeration facilities."

And there it was, a cold room in what amounted to a vault. 

_So what am I going to do? Burgle it? Like Dad said, getting caught and flung in jail would be inconvenient. Wouldn't do SI stock any favours either. Stark Solutions may be a private company but it's likely to go belly up too if its owner and CEO's in jail. But none of that matters because they have samples of Steve's blood and possibly other organs in there. Not to mention refined serum, according to their computer records._

He remembered Mallen, a glowing, zombie-like creature at the end of SHIELD's last failed super-soldier experiment. Not to mention the Mandroids, made by Justin Hammer from the tech he had stolen, purchased and still used by Fury, who knew all of that.

_My tech. It didn't belong to Hammer or Fury. The super-soldier serum – Steve's blood – doesn't belong to them either._

Decision made, he settled down in one of the trees, though the branches creaked under the armour's weight, hacked into the closed circuit surveillance system and prepared to wait for evening. He could use the time to engineer a special computer worm.

 

_Stark House, Long Island. Thursday, 5.51 pm_

Steve stared helplessly at his reflection in the screen of the laptop which had gone black of its own accord about fifteen minutes ago.

His appearance remained unfamiliar, though the laptop did not. Which was so very wrong.

So was the way he wanted Tony here, desperately. 

Which was ludicrous, because Tony being here wasn't going to make this right, or even explain it. 

But his absence hurt like hell.

_I've known him less than twenty-four hours. Why does it feel like years? What the hell is wrong with me?_

But Tony had been kind to him, rescued him, taken him in, and accepted him without question. So had Howard. Why had he trusted the son from the first while he still felt uneasy about the father?

None of it made sense, least of all his own existence. There was so much the man he was supposed to be shouldn't know but was familiar, and so much he should know but didn't.

"Captain." And that was Howard, not Tony. "Time to eat. You must be starving again with that high metabolism."

Steve only really heard the first word. "Don't call me that," he said dully. "I'm not him. I can't be him. There's been some terrible mistake."

"Steve." Howard reached out and turned the chair, so he could grasp his shoulder. "Steve, there's no mistake. Both Tony and I saw you on the SHIELD helicarrier when you were on life support. You're not easy to forget. And you've seen the Army photographs and film dating from when you fought in World War 2, though you were wearing the Captain America uniform in both. And there's the way your wounds healed. That's the super soldier serum, which has never been duplicated." 

"I'm not a superhero. I can't—"

"You don't have to be anything you don't want to be," Howard said, his voice as firm as if he was addressing a room full of recalcitrant shareholders.

"That, that _costume_ is ridiculous! I can't imagine going into battle wearing that," Steve protested. "I'm not a superhero. For all you know I'm a ringer. For all I know I could be a ringer!" It was a cry of frustration.

"Even if that were the case, Steve, and everything says it isn't, then it's not you – it's something that's been done to you. You're innocent."

Steve looked up into Howard's eyes, so like his son's. "Maybe they can trigger me. Maybe I'm meant to gain your confidence and destroy you. I don't know!"

"Except that you plainly weren't meant to come to us," Howard said. "No one could know that Tony would find you – and SHIELD thinks you're dead."

Steve shook his head. "There's a chance. You know there's a chance. So why are you helping me?"

"Well, Tony did find you. And he likes you. A lot."

 _Not enough. Or perhaps too much._ The thought was bitter.

He said, "He admires what he knows of Captain America."

It was now Howard's turn to shake his head. "Tony's had too much experience of people he admired turning out to have feet of clay to let that happen again. He isn't in need of a role model, Steve, just friends. And he is loyal and protective of his friends. So am I. Eat, Steve. Watch some silly TV, and then go to bed. It may look very different in the morning." He patted Steve's shoulders, then reached past him to turn off the laptop.

Steve wondered what would have happened if Tony hadn't found him, if Howard had turned him away. It would have been horrible for him, but better for both of them. "Thank you," he said. "I'm not sure I'll ever be in a position to repay you."

"I don't need payment, Steve. I'm a billionaire several times over. But, in fact, you repaid me by saving my life this morning, remember? And putting Whitney in a position where we can help her."

"You're so... kind. The girl tried to kill you."

"Because she stole something I never meant anyone to use. And Tony's fond of her. They used to date, I think. And he did destroy her father's dream – and him. Obie – her father – used to be my friend. He may have been a total bastard but he loved her and I'll do what I can for both of them. Come on, son. The food's getting cold."

 

_SHIELD Research Station, Maryland. Thursday, 8:03 pm_

It was eight o'clock in the evening and Tony was more jumpy than he had been when the Makluan had invaded. He’d had to stop himself calling home every few minutes to make sure everything was secure and that Steve and his Dad were okay. Which would be a mistake, because Howard would start asking questions and lying to him rarely worked, even with the faceplate and voice synthesiser in place.

Most of the staff had left the building, though there were still people in the Culver sections, when a woman – he suspected it was Morganti herself – made her way towards the vault, carrying an insulated flask.

It was that moment that a normally welcome voice spoke into his ear. "What's goin' on, Tones?"

"Little busy right now, Rhodey," Tony replied as he checked the stealth function was active, then descended from the tree.

On the CCTV, the scientist pressed her eye up to the sensor, and typed a series of numbers into the keypad. The door opened, and she stepped inside.

"I've had Pepper crying at me, then telling me to break out and get over there, then yelling at me—"

"Well, you know Pep," Tony responded absently, watching the scientist removing two frosted vials from the flask, and placing – replacing – them in labelled slots in the cold store. "Rhodey, call me back later, okay? Computer, radio silence."

"To—"

Morganti – if it was Morganti – made a note on the digital pad let into the wall beside the refrigerated unit, signed it, and left.

The door closed behind her. All the readings now said that the locking mechanism and security were working. They weren't. Tony had tricked them, via Extremis, into leaving the area unsecured. Next he reached for the closed circuit cameras and turned off all the movement sensors on his route to the vault.

It took him precisely ten minutes and twenty three seconds to enter the building, make his way to the vault, open the doors, scoop every vial of blood and serum into a fold-out shopping bag that had been stowed in one of the armour's secure cavities, replace the bag with one special and very old sample and leave, letting the delayed commands lock the vault behind him.

As a last act before he left, he released the worm that would, eventually, scramble all the data and the backups.

 

On the way home he took a detour out over the coast, smashed each vial between his hands, and let them drop into the sea. 

"War Machine is calling you again," his computer said as he turned towards the continental USA.

Tony sighed, and gathered his wits for the coming conversation. "Put him through. Hi, Rhodey."

"What the hell is going on back home?" Rhodey demanded, without any greeting at all.

"Things have gotten complicated," Tony said. "I need you to stand back from this, Rhodey. It might compromise your career."

_Or worse, you might be forced to betray me._

"Now you're scaring me, buddy," Rhodey said, his voice sharp. "You're doing something that's gonna get you into trouble, aren't you?"

"Dad knows about it. He's supporting me." Tony hoped he didn't sound as defensive as he felt. Rhodey's moral sense could cut in at the most inconvenient times. He supposed it came from having a father in the military and a mother who was a lawyer. Or maybe being made to go to church. "But it wouldn't be the first time you disapproved of my actions and I turned out to be right."

"Or wrong," Rhodes said. "I'm gonna speak to the Commandant an' ask for an extension of my weekend pass."

"No. Don't do that. I won't be available. I'm handing out rain checks for movie night."

"Is this to do with Pepper?"

"No. It's to do with something important coming up."

"Something you won't tell me about. For that, bro, I am sure dialling back on your birthday present."

"I said 'a rain check' not a cancellation," Tony protested. "You can't get involved, Rhodey. Neither can Pep."

"You sure your Dad's backing you?" Rhodey sounded sceptical.

"Positive. Call him and ask."

"Then good luck. And you call me if you need me."

 

_Stark House, Long Island. Thursday, 10:52 pm._

Tony's mood grew ever more cheerful as he flew home and, by the time he arrived in the armoury he was happy if a little tired. He wanted, urgently, to see Steve but he actually needed to talk to his father first.

Howard was working late in his office but, as ever, put everything aside to listen to Tony. "This is sample of the original Captain America's DNA," was how Tony opened the conversation, laying the sealed sample on the desk. "According to SHIELD's scientists it's identical to that of the guy who was frozen in the ice."

He waited, but Howard merely leaned back in his chair and regarded him levelly. "Steve gave me a sample before dinner," Howard said. He hesitated, then went on, "He was pretty down."

Tony's heart lurched and he suddenly found it hard to breathe. "Why? What's wrong?"

_I shouldn't have stayed away so long. I should have been here for him._

Howard took his time about answering and Tony just knew he was phrasing his answer in response to the note of panic in his own voice. "He's having trouble connecting with his past – with the records of his past. The superhero stuff."

"Just the superhero stuff?"

"He may be starting to doubt Steve Rogers too," Howard admitted.

"The DNA analysis should settle that."

"I'll courier the samples over to Hank right now. He works the same sort of hours you do. And after you eat, you might look in and see if Steve's asleep. If he isn't he'll probably be glad to see you. I did my best, using all my fatherly experience—"

"Dad!" Tony was outraged.

"In terms of life experience he's either twenty-four years or twenty-four hours old," Howard pointed out. "Take your pick. I don't think it worked for me, but he may go for the kid brother approach."

Tony threw up his hands in a gesture of surrender and left. He didn't want Steve to think of him as a kid brother, but if that would help him, he'd give it the good old college try.

Even if he'd never gone to college or played football.

 

Howard was right: Steve wasn't asleep, though the darkened room nearly fooled Tony into thinking he was. Instead he was sitting by the window, peering out into the night, his eyes hooded. Somehow, Tony knew at once that he was deeply unhappy. He wanted to reach out and comfort him the way he had no doubt his father had, but he didn't trust his control. He sought frantically for something to say, but what came out was, "Uh, Steve..."

Steve turned, his face lighting up momentarily before it darkened again. "Tony. You're back." He took a deep breath and forced a smile. "Did you have a good time with your girl?"

Tony, his mind on his long day burgling SHIELD's research facilities on Steve's behalf, blinked. "Girl?"

"The one with the odd nickname," Steve elaborated. "Pepper?"

"Pepper isn't my girlfriend," Tony protested. _Though maybe she thinks she is._

"Your father says she is." But Steve's expression had brightened a little.

"We went on a few dates. She's my friend, and a member of team Iron Man. But she really wants to be a SHIELD agent—"

"The organisation which imprisoned me?"

"Yes. Which is why I've spent today making sure they won't be able to identify you even if they find you. And why Pepper has no idea you exist."

"Nor have I."

"What?"

"I've been researching this Captain America guy and I don't think for one moment I could have been him. He was supposed to have been treated with this super-soldier serum, right? One of the things it is reported is giving him is a perfect memory. I don't remember anything! Even if I were Steve Rogers, I could have been brainwashed. I've been looking up the techniques. I may have been put here to spy on you, or SHIELD. I could be the worst danger you've ever faced."

Whatever argument Tony had expected it had not been that. He'd been all prepared to explain DNA analysis, but that wasn't going to help right at this moment.

_C'mon, Stark, think! Ah..._

"I know someone who can confirm that you're no threat to us," Tony said. "He may even be able to restore your memory."

Steve's eyes were wide. "He?"

"Professor Charles Xavier. He's a telepath."

Steve shook his head in disbelief. "A telepath?"

"He reads minds," Tony explained.

"I know what the word means," Steve said. "You mean he's some sort of stage magician?"

"Nope. A mutant," Tony said. "There are a lot of them around. Xavier trains them to use their powers for good. And he really does read minds. So does one of his students. I've met her. She was on the run and we worked together to defeat this big time supervillain mutant called Magneto. I'll call the Westchester school in the morning. Even if Xavier brushes me off, Jean should be able to get me in to see him. But I think he'll be intrigued enough to help."

 

_Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters, Westchester, New York. Friday, 08:25 am_

Steve hadn't known what to expect, but it certainly wasn't the huge mansion behind its high walls and wrought-iron gates. Tony drove the ordinary-looking but, he had been told, supercharged, convertible through those gates and along the sweeping drive between the manicured trees and lawns. He parked in front of the house, where a number of teenagers were sitting or standing casually on the front steps, plainly interested and trying not to show it.

Tony jumped out of the driver's seat and peered over his sunglasses at them. "Don't you kids have classes?" 

"Indeed they do." The voice was commanding and the gawkers scattered at once, some heading back through the big doors, past the bald-headed man in what would have been a wheelchair, if it had wheels, and others round the side the building at a dead run.

Steve's eyes went a little wider, not at the sight of the bald man but at the flame-haired girl standing beside him and the tall young man in the thick sunglasses glaring protectively at them both. Both aroused emotions of respect and fear.

Tony stepped forward to shake the hand of the man in the chair. "Professor Xavier. Thank you for agreeing to help us."

"I remember the help you've given me, Mr Stark. And please call me Charles."

"Then I'm Tony. This is—"

"Steve," Steve said, quickly. He inclined his head. "Professor."

Meanwhile, Tony was greeting the gorgeous redhead with obvious delight. "Jean, it's great to see you."

"And you, Tony. My goodness, you've grown," she added, offering him her cheek to kiss. She grinned mischievously up at him and flicked a glance sideways at the man with the sunglasses to see how he was taking it. Which was not well.

Xavier could not quite hide his own smile, though he bowed his head so that perhaps only Steve saw it. When he raised it again his expression was bland. "And my senior students are Jean Grey and Scott Summers."

"Stark," Summers said coldly, and his voice wasn't much warmer as he added, "Steve," with the distaste of a man forced to use a first name because he hasn't been given a surname.

"Any friend of Tony's is one of mine," Jean said, though she did not offer her hand.

"Come this way," Xavier said, swinging his wheel-less chair around in the air. "We can talk in my study."

 

The study was almost exactly the opposite of everything in the Stark house; book lined, with Victorian antique furniture, and a number of second-rate browning seascapes in baroque gilded frames, and reeking of nostalgia and convention.

Steve was pretty sure that it all was merely theatrical scene setting and meant to be reassuring. He was not reassured.

"Sit down, gentlemen," Xavier said, in his soft voice. "Steve, Tony briefed me on your problems. As he will have told you, I am a telepath – a 'mind reader' in the lay term of your era. In this instance, in order to help you I must probe far below your surface thoughts. I need to be sure that you consent to this. If you want back out now, I will not pressure you or take offense."

"You have my consent," Steve said, decidedly not crossing his fingers out of habit, because he wasn't certain if Xavier was telling the truth or if he was already probing. Time to check. "But if you can read my mind you must know that."

"Unless you pose a danger to my students I will never read your mind without your permission. In fact, the most difficult thing about being a telepath is keeping out intrusive thought. Which is why Jean did not offer to shake hands: touch is difficult for telepaths, and she is not fully trained. Now, sit down and relax. Do you mind Jean and Scott being here? Jean will observe and monitor our exchange."

He did not mention Summers, but Steve could guess that neither he nor Tony was fully trusted, at least by Summers.

"That's fine," Steve said. "So long as I can have Tony standing by."

"Of course you must have Tony," Xavier replied easily.

"Tony isn't going anywhere," Tony said. "Don't worry, Steve. There's no need to be apprehensive."

 _And why would Tony say that if he wasn't already as apprehensive as I am?_ Steve asked himself. _This all seemed so straightforward this morning... Well, as straightforward as it could be when dealing with unknown quantities like super-powered mutants._

Xavier waved Steve over to a large, comfortable armchair and told him to try to relax.

Steve was sure he wouldn't be able to do so, was waiting for an attempt at hypnosis or some other trickery, but though Xavier had not said a word, was not even looking at him, the room slowly faded into blinding sunlight.

It seemed to Steve that he was standing on a wide empty beach which stretched away in every direction, until, at the far horizon, it disappeared into sea, or mist or both.

Charles Xavier came walking across the sand towards him. Here he was a younger man, tall when out of the chair, with a mobile expression and a head of brown curls. Jean stood some distance away, and she looked older, her long red hair lifting about her like flames, as if she, out of all three of them, was surrounded by wind.

Steve took a few steps towards Xavier, noticing that neither of them was leaving footprints on the sand.

"Where are we?" Steve asked, his voice hushed.

"In a metaphor for your long term memory," Xavier replied. "It seems... rather empty."

"I don't remember anything before I woke up on the... helicarrier?"

"And it is plain you are telling the truth. Yet you remember how to speak English and, Tony tells me, French, German, Spanish and Italian, that he has tested. You even know a few words of Japanese.

_What? He didn't... or I didn't notice. Does he speak all those languages?_

"Your self-image is much the same as your present appearance," Xavier went on. "Though you look older here."

"So does Jean."

"Which is odd, because you and Jean have not met before today. Your image of her is strange and troubling. I am imposing my mental image of myself here, but she is merely observing. I find it... interesting."

 _I find it darn disturbing,_ was Steve's immediate response as he tried to make sense of this new information. It reminded him of the way he had been unsurprised by Tony's appearance. 

"Are you telling me that that is how I see her?" he asked carefully.

"Perhaps. Not everything here is clear. Take my hand. Let us see if we can penetrate the mists."

Steve took the offered hand, and he and Xavier rose into the air, Jean following close behind. 

Almost at once, the mists rose up and surrounded them. Above them, Jean was burning, a great bird of fire to light their passage. The red-gold light rolled off the swirling fog, revealing nothing.

There was movement in the mists, but what was causing it was never clear. Angry and frustrated, Steve let go of Xavier's hand, and tumbled down into the mists, seeking whatever was hidden there...

And, in the blink of an eye, they were back in Xavier's study. Tony had a hand on his shoulder, rock solid and steady, his eyes narrowed on Xavier. "What happened?" he asked, then, to Steve, "Did you remember?"

Steve shook his head. "I remember nothing except sand and mist, the Professor and Jean."

"Interesting," Xavier said. "Because this is what I saw in your memory."

There was no mist. The image was clear in his mind as if he was seeing it with his eyes: it was Tony, yet a Tony who was constantly changing, tall and short, now a even younger Tony than the one he knew, now with lines around his eyes and grey at his temples, eyes blue and grey and even a dark brown, clean shaven, with a hairline moustache like his father's, with a short beard, there in an instant and gone at once, in the armour, so many different types of armour, in business suits, in jeans and tee-shirt, in some sort of uniform with far too much white about it to be suitable, with strange device after strange device buried in his chest, and it was followed by older, stranger images...

And a feeling of disappointment. Always disappointment.

Overwhelming and gone in an instant, leaving a vast emptiness, a yearning...

"I don't understand," Steve whispered, as it ended.

"Nor do I," Xavier admitted. "This something new to me. I can confirm that you woke in restraints on the SHIELD helicarrier – and that is not an implanted memory but your own. But from before you fell? Only this. I cannot restore what does not exist."

Xavier deserved to know the truth. "I don't think I am Captain America," Steve said, and felt Tony's hand tighten on his shoulder so hard it ought to hurt – but didn't.

"I do not know for certain that you were or were not," Xavier answered, "but now you can be who you want to be. There is no reason for you to take up that mantle, though I think you fully capable of it. You have a fresh start, Steve. Be who you want to be." 

But that was something Steve simply could not do. He was quiet on the ride home – no, it wasn't his home, he needed to remember that – and Tony was also silent, concentrating on the traffic.

He must be so disappointed in him.

 

_Approaching the Stark House, Long Island. Friday, 10:45 am_

The silence in the car had lasted from Xavier's school, across the Whitestone Bridge and through the heavy traffic on highway 495. Tony had been unable to think of a way to break it. It was not until they had left the highway and were nearing home that the problem solved itself, by the ringtone that signified his father. He told the cell to, "Put him on." He waited a couple of beats then said, "Hi, Dad. We'll be back at the house in five minutes."

"You may not want to drive straight to the garage, not if you want to keep Steve's presence secret," Howard said. "The computer has just reported that Pepper has arrived – and, of course, you ordered that no one should be allowed in—"

"Let her into the armoury." Tony was thinking quickly. "I'll send Steve around the back yard. Can you meet him, Dad, but first switch off the driveway monitors and the alarms in the backyard walls until he gets over them."

"Got it. I take it you don't want me to talk to Pepper?"

"Only to tell her I'm on my way. I'll handle it." Though Tony was not at all sure that he could. He stopped the car just inside the gates and turned to Steve, who was watching him warily, the way he had all the way back from Xavier's. 

_It was a mistake taking him to Westchester, but I couldn't have known— What if he's thinking of running? No, I have to trust him or I'll be just as bad as Fury._

"Round the back of the house there's a walled yard," he said. "Don't try the doors – there may be someone watching. Find the areas that can't be seen from the anywhere but the house and go over the wall. Dad will meet you."

 

_Approaching the Stark House, Long Island. Friday 10:50 am_

Once out of the convertible, Steve waited until it had vanished into the trees, then moved off the road and started back down towards the local road. But with each step he became more nervous, his doubts about this course of action growing with every step. The decision to leave had been made on the spur of the moment, prompted by the events at Xavier's and the opportunity opened by Tony's actions.

He was too great a problem for Tony and Howard to deal with, for all their confidence in their own judgement. They were taking too great a risk for someone they didn't know and had only met a couple of days ago.

_They're taking it for Captain America. I'm not him._

But leaving Tony behind hurt. Tony was his only friend in the world... no, that wasn't fair to Howard. Howard had been just as kind, and even more understanding, despite being justifiably uneasy about taking on SHIELD.

_He's the sort of father I wish I'd had. Maybe he's the sort of father I did have, but somehow I doubt it._

But it was not because he was walking away from his friends, his rescuers. After all, he was leaving for their own good. And this was the same unexpected feeling he had had as they had driven to Xavier's, a compelling need to rush back to the house, a feeling that had eased as they drove back.

Was it instinct, or something more?

_Am I walking back to SHIELD, after all Tony and Howard have done to keep me safe? I killed four men on the helicarrier. That's not the action of a hero, though it might be one of a soldier. Tony and Howard haven't mentioned it. They can't know I'm a murderer – but how was I supposed to react? I was a prisoner... Tony is trusting me. I don't want to hurt him. God, I'd rather die than hurt him. Maybe I'd better rethink this._

 

_Iron Man Armoury, Stark House, Long Island. Friday, 10:53 am_

Pepper had shed the Rescue armour. Now she turned to Tony as he sauntered into the armoury, trying to disguise his nervousness. Her expression was both apprehensive and determined.

Tony guessed his was much the same. "Hi, Pepper."

"Dad says you didn't dump me," Pepper gabbled. "But his face when he said it wasn't convincing. I didn't really believe you'd dump me like that, but you were so rude and Rhodey says you've cancelled tomorrow's movie night. Is that for everyone?"

He'd told Rhodey it was a rain check. "Postponed but, yeah. I was going to call you this morning, but something came up."

Pepper's face fell. "I thought— What, something came up? What am I, chopped liver? You talked to Dad _and_ Rhodey yesterday, and you knew I was upset and now—"

"Pepper."

"—you just ignore me when I've come all the way from LA to see you, and you know how much I—" Tony saw the realisation hit her hard. "You did dump me!"

Tony took a deep breath and said, "We weren't dating, Pep."

"We weren't—"

Tony put a finger on her lips, but he noted that she was angry rather than heartbroken even though her eyes were brimming with tears. "We had maybe three dates, Pep. Nearly a year ago. I've moved on. I supposed that you had too."

And that was a lie. But he could hardly say, "I met someone else the day before yesterday." Not when he wasn't likely to be able to date Steve. And when he had to avoid giving Pepper the choice between him and SHIELD. "You'll always be my friend, Pepper, and you'll always have the Rescue armour. Mind you, if anyone except you tries to tamper with it, or even examine it too closely, all the electronics will be scrambled and the servos will melt down. Then I'll upgrade it for you, every time, because you deserve it. And when, in about twenty years time, you're Director of SHIELD, maybe—"

"You really think I could be Director of SHIELD?" Pepper was suddenly breathless.

"I'm banking on it," Tony said. "Because I put a helluva lot more trust in your morality than in Fury's – or mine for that matter."

"Yet you've just friendzoned me. There's someone else, isn't there?" 

_Damn. Does she have to be so damn bright?_

"It's Whitney, isn't it?" Pepper went on. "Would it have helped if I'd dyed my hair blonde like she does?"

_Don't deny it. Let her think it's Whitney._

"You never did like Whitney," Tony said, which was the absolute truth. "But she's had a pretty rough time of it." Also true. "And I'm damn sure you haven't been celibate and pining for me, Pepper, any more than I have for you."

He'd had plenty of offers and a few one-night stands, usually when he had been feeling particularly lonely. At first he had felt guilty, that he had perhaps betrayed Pepper, but as time passed that had faded, and he started to enjoy himself.

"I have business elsewhere over the next few days," he said, with a dismissive wave of his hand.

Pepper gave him a long hard look. "Business. So I— your friends – come way behind business and science and fucking anything that moves. Okay, Tony, you win. Keep your damn secrets. And tell Whitney that I wish her luck."

 

_Outside the Stark House, Long Island. Friday, 10:59am_

The wall was over eight feet tall, but Steve vaulted it easily. He still wasn't sure that coming back to the Stark house was the right decision, but it was already easing his fears, reassuring him that he was safe and welcome.

Howard was waiting for him on the terrace, a pot of tea and two mugs on the wrought iron table.

Steve sank down beside him and Howard poured the tea with no comment.

It was a minute or so before either of them spoke.

"So, Tony still doesn't trust Pepper," Howard observed. "Even if he is finally talking to her."

"He thinks she may betray us – him – to SHIELD."

Howard sighed. "I suspect that conversation isn't going that well. Though it is time Tony faced up to having to deal with relationships. He went along with Pepper, who's in love with him, or thinks she is, because that was the easiest thing to do. So he needs to face the consequences, however painful they are."

Steve squirmed a little with the realisation that he hated any criticism of Tony, however justified and however gentle, even from someone who obviously loved him. He concentrated on his tea, which was nothing like he expected tea to taste.

"What's this?"

"Rooibos – redbush. I grew to love it when visiting South Africa. Try it with some sugar."

Steve did as suggested and found it acceptable. He even thought he might get to like it.

"I take it didn't go too well with Xavier," Howard said. 

"Why should you think that?" Steve asked defensively.

"Because you aren't flushed with enthusiasm, are you? If you'd had your memory restored you'd delighted."

"There's nothing restore," Steve said. "My long term memory's blank."

Except for something he shouldn't have, memories of Tony that seemed to belong to more than one person...

"I'm sorry to hear that. Tony was counting on Xavier."

_It was my last hope too._

He had to tell someone his conclusions and saying this to Tony would be far too painful. "I can handle not being Captain America," he said, "but I'm not Steve Rogers either, if he was the real Captain America."

Howard raised a single eyebrow. "Well, I've heard back from Hank Pym. He is quite certain that your DNA matches what we have from the original Steve Rogers – you are genetically identical, which means you are either him or an identical twin who was given the same serum and frozen in the ice for the same amount of time. There was some deterioration in the old sample, but not enough to make a difference. You are him, Steve. It was you who was being held captive and unconscious on the helicarrier. Tony confirms your story from the evidence he found there. Unless you don't believe him."

"Of course I believe him! But I've been through the files. None of it means anything to me. I don't remember my childhood, or World War 2, or any of the people they say I fought with: Namor, Torch, Bucky, Spitfire, Toro, Union Jack. They mean nothing. Nothing! But I remember Tony. Xavier confirmed that. I remember Tony but he saw different versions of Tony in my memory, hundreds of them; fighting them, fighting beside them, being friends with them, arguing with them... I know fighting moves I shouldn't. Hell, I know words I shouldn't. Something terrible has happened. Captain America was dead. I'm alive and in his body." Steve paused, drawing shuddering breath after shuddering breath.

"I could care less if you're the real Steve Rogers, though I'm sure you are. What I know is that my son thinks you hung the sun and stars," Howard said.

"Don't tell Tony," Steve whispered. "Howard, please don't tell Tony. I don't want to hurt him."

"I don't think you would, willingly. Just don't underestimate your effect on him when you're making your choices."

"He's my priority," Steve said, then added, even more softly, "I think he always has been."

"You're certainly his." There was an odd note in Howard's voice, and Steve did not dare comment. After a while, though, Howard said, "If you need a safe place to think things through I can provide one, though since yesterday Tony owns the one I'd prefer. He'll insist on going with you— no, Steve." He held up a hand. "Believe me, if I try to stop him he won't rest until he finds you. And I want him to rest too. I think you both need to get out of New York. Right now. Vanish. Let Roberta and myself handle Fury. So go pack. You'll find you have rather more possessions now than you did yesterday, so you may have to unwrap them first."

 

_Garage, Stark House, Long Island. Friday, 11:45 am_

Steve carried his duffle down to the garage, where he found Tony rummaging in a large sports bag. It appeared to have been neatly packed – originally.

"Problem?" he asked, dumping his own bag beside an untouched small backpack.

"I'm sure there's something important I've forgotten," Tony said, "but everything seems to be there."

Steve looked at the small piles and did a mental check. Apart from two of the ubiquitous tablets and a small tool pack, it pretty much matched the gear he had stowed into the duffle a few minutes before, save that Tony's tee shirts were mostly red. "Looks okay to me."

"Me too, and that's the problem. I'm used to travelling, and travelling light. Normally I'd also pack formal wear, but that would be in a separate pack and, anyway, I don't need it."

"You haven't checked the back-pack," Steve pointed out.

"That's the Iron Man armour," Tony said, off-handedly.

"You're joking!"

"Nope. I had that with me all the way through high school, though it's been upgraded since. I refuse to go undefended." He repacked the bag quickly and surprisingly neatly and stood glaring at it for a moment before turning to Steve. "You got everything you need?"

"Unless we're going to the desert, the rain forest or the poles, then yes."

"None of those. It should be safe but... Did Dad give you a gun?"

"He offered me one and I refused. I don't have a licence for one."

"You don't have a driver’s licence or a birth certificate either!"

"You don't know if I can drive," Steve pointed out. "In fact, I don't know if I can drive. Why are you so antsy, Tony?"

"I'm not," Tony snapped.

Steve smiled indulgently at him. "Go on. Go to your room and your workshop or whatever and look for whatever it is you think you've left behind. I'll wait here. Otherwise you're going to fret about it and I'm kinda looking forward to relaxing."

 

_Workshop, Iron Man Armoury, Stark House, Long Island. Friday, 11:48 am_

Tony hardly hesitated before picking up his bag and heading back towards the repulsor elevator to his suite. But on the way through the workshop are he paused. After a few seconds fighting the impulse, he crossed to one of the security cabinets and opened it. There, sitting on a shelf smirking at him was the artefact Gene had sent him. Almost without thought, he pulled on heavy gauntlets and shoved the artefact into his bag. The gauntlets followed, and then he zipped the bag closed.

Instantly, he felt much better.

After all, he couldn't leave it here, where it might fall in someone else's hands. If it was stolen, Gene would probably try to kill him; given the power of the Makluan rings in the Mandarin's hands, he was likely to succeed. It was better that no one else even saw it until he knew exactly what it did. That project would also give him something interesting to work on over the next couple of weeks.

Oddly, Steve also seemed much more relaxed on their journey to JFK, but Tony attributed that to the fact they were finally on the move and, he hoped, to the knowledge that Tony was going with him.

 

_Rural New York State. Friday, 6:10 pm_

Steve eased his position in the front passenger seat of the battered station wagon – Tony called it an SUV – and watched the evening sunlight flickering hypnotically between the branches of the trees that flanked the road through the hills. That flicker was also getting faster as, for the first time in their journey, Tony put his foot on the gas. A quick glance up at the windshield showed eighty miles an hour on the head up display.

Something else that was familiar enough for him to name, though if he had really been Captain America – or Steve Rogers – he should not have been.

He hadn't seen that kind of display on other local cars, either.

_Stop thinking about it._

But he couldn't.

As a distraction, he turned to look at Tony who was still, after over four hours on the road, driving with verve and precision. It was pure pleasure to watch his competent hands on the wheel, the concentration of his eyes on the road.

That he was beautiful didn't lessen that pleasure, either, though it did make Steve remember why he had been looking out of the window. His jeans were too tight for his crotch to be comfortable.

Of course, he could ask Tony where they were going, but that might make it seem as if he didn't trust him. He wasn't going to do that because the one person he was sure about was Tony. And he was, which was strangely more difficult, learning to trust Howard.

It had swiftly become clear when they had started their journey that neither of the Starks intended that they would be followed. The private jet – and he shouldn't have known what a jet was, either – had taken off without them, heading for the other side of the country. Instead, he and Tony had jumped into the back of a truck, which they had exited at a gas station forty minutes later. The SUV had been waiting for them in a lot some ten minutes walk away.

Since then they had been travelling west and north.

The road now began to descend, and Tony was plainly watching for a turning.

When he found it, he turned the SUV onto a short drive and drew to a stop at a closed gate. He took out his cell and tapped in a number. "It's Tony," he said. "I'm at the gate."

Seconds later, the gate swung open.

 

Not far from the road they arrived at a white-painted ranch house with barns surrounding it. Horses grazed in the paddocks, and a trio of ponies peered over the rails of a corral.

A woman was waiting for them in the drive, her smile wide. She was neat and slim, dressed in jeans cut for riding and man's sports shirt.

Tony pulled to a stop beside her and lowered the window. "Hi, Lori."

"Hi yourself." Her appearance might have been Western, but her voice was pure New York. "Aren't you all grown up now?" She stroked her chin with her fingers, miming a beard.

Tony laughed "This is Steve," he said, gesturing to his right. "Steve, Lori Scott."

"Ma'am." Steve nodded at her, touching his baseball cap's visor with his fingers in a near salute.

Her sharp honey-brown eyes assessed him but she did not comment.

"You get Dad's message, Lori?"

"Yes. The hands and the family aren't here right now. I went to open up the cabin and provision it myself. But are you sure you can't stay here with us, Tony? Food's likely to be better, unless your friend Steve here's your personal chef."

"I'd love to, but we aren't really here."

"So Howard said. Tell him we want to see him soon, Tony. We miss both of you." She slapped her hand on the roof of the SUV, and Tony gunned the engine.

For a while they followed a gravelled track at a slow pace, Tony looking to his left, then he turned suddenly, making Steve grab for a handhold. They bucketed across rough pasture, where the only sign of a track was some crushed and flattened grass which disappeared into a line of trees. 

This, it turned out, edged a small, fast stream with deep cut banks, crossed by a simple bridge of two flat metal plates, a car's width apart. Tony jumped out to check their position, then drove straight across.

To Steve's surprise he left the car again, signalling to Steve to follow him. They lifted the two bridge plates one by one and slotted them into grease-slick concrete holders set into the ground.

"That gap won't stop a determined assault," Steve said.

"No, but it'll stop us being discovered by a lost walker. And might stop a casual inspection."

As the SUV continued along a dirt road hidden beneath overlapping branches, Tony suddenly said, "This was my mother's favourite place. She used to breed horses here – Arabs and Andalusians. Her will left the pasture and stock to Lori – her farm manager – and her family. But the wild land beyond and the cabin on the lake are mine. Until last week they were held in trust for me. Something Stane never got his hands on," he added grimly.

"So that's where we heading: the cabin on the lake?"

"Wait and see."

 

The 'cabin' was actually a substantial house, roofed in shingles of local timber that would hide most of it from the air. A long transparent deck on granite stilts strode out into the calm waters of the lake, tempting Steve to just sit at its end with water and trees surrounding him.

In another world.

He drew in a deep breath, and this, this was how air should taste.

Maybe he would be able to see more clearly here.

But he didn't think he would find peace.

 

_Stark Cabin, Grey Goose Lake, New York State. Saturday to Wednesday._

Tony had forgotten how much he loved the cabin on the lake. He had mainly come here with his father's butler, Edwin Jarvis, who had, surprisingly, taught him to paddle a canoe, to sail and fish, and later to shoot. Lori had taught him to ride, her father to drive, and those occasions where Howard had joined them had been the happiest of his life. It was only later that he understood how difficult it had been for his father to visit this place where he had spent such happy times with his wife.

Maybe he should tell Lori that the instant Howard needed a safe place for his son and his... friend... to hide out, he had thought of the cabin, trusting her to do her best to keep them safe.

To his own astonishment, Tony had slept for over twelve hours after they had arrived here. He'd firmly steered Steve to the main suite. It had the largest bed, which Steve needed more than he did, and he did not want to sleep in what had been his parents' bed. Nor think about Steve sleeping there, as it happened.

He woke to a clatter in the kitchen and the smell of coffee, which set a precedent. 

Steve took over the cooking, at first groping his way through the small selection of recipe books available but then showing increasing skill. That must have been something he had learned before the ice, like his ability to swim like a fish or to drive the SUV down the disused forest tracks at speed. He certainly could not have learned to play the video games to which Tony had introduced him, but his extraordinary reflexes and obviously high intelligence gave him advantages that Tony had to stretch his own long-term skills to their limits to counter.

There were a lot of silences, those first few days, until Tony realised that Steve wasn't going to override him or interrupt him. He began to talk the way he had once talked with his Dad, before he had learned to keep his own counsel, and before Pepper had arrived to make it much easier for him to do just that. Once she was there, no one noticed if he had suddenly become taciturn – except, of course, when he was in the Iron Man suit where he was free to babble as much as he liked.

Steve seemed to enjoy his company, whether he was talking or silent.

But Steve was troubled. He often seemed to drift off into a painful reverie, his eyebrows drawing together in a frown, mouth turning down, and he would look at Tony as if he was something precious that he was about to lose.

Tony had no practice at dealing with emotional secrets. He'd left that kind of thing to Rhodey and his father. The only person he knew who was worse at it was Pepper.

What he really wanted to do was to put his arms around Steve and hold him – but it became clearer and clearer that Steve didn't want to touch him, dodging away from his outstretched hand.

That hurt, far more that it should. Tony wasn't keen on being touched by strangers himself. But Steve wasn't a stranger. 

Putting aside his own feelings, Tony kept him company, even when he insisted on swimming in the currently icy waters of the lake. However, it turned out that Extremis had also enhanced Tony's metabolism, so neither he nor Steve froze to death.

Enhanced it in other ways too, which was rapidly becoming a problem. He wanted Steve, wanted him with an intensity that was scaring him rigid. 

Work helped a little. The cabin had internet connection from one of the Stark communications satellites, enabling Tony to work on current projects, to keep his hands and mind busy. He didn't really have time to get back to the artefact he had thrown into his backpack, though it preyed on his mind when he wasn't in the cabin. For some reason, he didn't want Steve to see it. It had been the tipping point of his break up with Pepper, and he was determined that history would not repeat itself.

His Van Dyke, now neatly trimmed if a little short, was growing in properly, and he was delighted with it. Steve, on the other hand, continued to shave, though his head hair was now nearly two inches long and was looking untidy. Tony's urge to run his fingers through it grew stronger the longer it grew...

He thought he'd been in love before – with Whitney, with Pepper – but there had been nothing like this desperate need to touch. Which he wasn't allowed to do.

The universe hated him. Worse, Steve was indifferent to him. He thought he could have lived with the former if the latter wasn't true.

Except it was.

 

_Stark Cabin, Grey Goose Lake, New York State. Thursday, 9:02 am_

Steve had just come back early from a run, persuaded to turn back by a gnawing apprehension that he put down to worry over Tony's safety. It wasn't logical, of course, and arriving back to find Tony unharmed and working, he hurried to take a much-needed cold shower.

He had just finished dressing when Tony called him into the sitting room. Imagining all sorts of disasters, he was through the door and to Tony's side in half a dozen strides.

Tony was sitting with his tablet propped up on the table in front of him. "There's a message from Dad," he said. "Short burst, highly compressed and encrypted." His hands flew over the virtual keyboard. "Let's see it..."

A green-tinted three-dimensional image of Howard appeared in the centre of the room.

"Tony, Steve. You need to know that AIM was responsible for sabotaging the arc reactor on board the helicarrier and, therefore, it was probably AIM agents who abducted Steve – so if your conscience has been troubling you about assaulting them, Steve, forget it. They're a high-tech terrorist organisation which seems to have been hiding out in Latveria. They also raided a SHIELD biological facility researching the super-soldier serum so I suspect that was where the last of Captain America's blood samples and the extracted super-soldier serum was being stored. As Fury is incandescent I presume SHIELD thinks they took those, and the research results."

Steve noted both Howard's careful phrasing and Tony's visible flinch. And, of course, the samples against which Hank Pym had compared his own DNA had to have come from somewhere. He doubted that either Tony or Howard would have asked Fury for them. But just how had Howard known that Steve had 'assaulted' anyone?

"Also, Whitney hasn't stopped talking since she woke up. She was hired by the Doombot, which she thought was Doom. It thought it was too, as most of them do. She also described the way Steve took her and the Doombot down. Fury came round demanding I hand Steve over to him. He searched the place – I escorted him personally into the armoury, but didn't let him take a closer look at the armour or the equipment. We'll have it fumigated before you come back.

"Then I called in Roberta. I think it's worth letting you hear what she told Fury." Howard's image wavered and the scene expanded into an office where he was now sitting behind a desk, a tall, smartly suited African-American woman standing at his shoulder. 

Another African-American, this time a man wearing one of those dislikeable SHIELD uniforms, was pacing the office, glaring at Howard every time he turned. This was, presumably, Fury.

A redheaded woman in a black cat-suit was watching all of them sardonically.

It was Fury whose voice they heard first. "Captain America was dead, in every sense."

"Except the physical," and that was Howard himself. "Did you find him or any trace of him at AIM?"

Fury stopped pacing and his chin jutted forwards. "No," he growled, "and that body belongs to us."

The woman standing behind Howard – Roberta? – stepped forward. "You did not come here looking for a dead body," she pointed out, her voice soft but assured. It occurred to Steve that it was a voice that would lull you into a false sense of security, if you happened to be opposed it its owner.

"No, I came here looking for an enhanced individual who _looks exactly like him._ "

"And on whom you have not the slightest claim. If Captain America isn't dead then, wherever he is, you imprisoned him illegally and I'd advise him to sue you for every cent you have. As for Mr Stark's friend, he makes no claim to be Captain America, and we do not do so on his behalf."

"Then who is he?" Fury snarled.

"Convince a Federal judge that you have reason under law to demand a warrant, then we'll talk," Roberta said. "Meanwhile, you undoubtedly have a sample of Captain America's DNA – I intend to subpoena you to produce it so we can compare it with that of any man you claim to be him, and we'll have an answer as to who he is or is not once and for all. But that does not mean we will hand anyone who is not a criminal over to you."

There was a repressed chortle of laughter and a murmur of admiration from Tony.

"We found Steve Rogers in the Arctic," Fury was protesting. "Without us he'd still be frozen in the ice."

"No one has been able to own a human being in this country for over a hundred and fifty years," Roberta stated, dark eyes blazing with repressed anger, though her voice remained calm. "No one gets to have slaves anymore and as for Captain Rogers – well, if he still lives, his stint with the army ended a long time ago. And you are not the US Army. You have been high handed with other people and other people's property before now, General. I suggest you take care before riding rough-shod over human rights in the future."

Ignoring Roberta, Fury stared into Howard's eyes: "Other people have high-powered lawyers, Stark."

Howard grinned. "None as good as Ms Rhodes."

Fury's gaze was scorching. "This is not the end of this," he said and stamped out.

The red-haired woman lingered a moment. "Say hello to Tony for me," she said, "and tell him I wish him well."

The picture blurred out again, cutting back to Howard who said, merely, "We have your backs. Hank has destroyed the material as per instructions. Keep on the down-low for a while longer," and vanished.

"Who was the red-head?" Steve asked, trying to keep the jealousy he felt out of his voice.

"Natasha Romanoff, the Black Widow, ex-Russian spy, current SHIELD agent, partnered with a guy called Clint Barton, code name Hawkeye. They used to be on the other side of the law, but they're good people," Tony told him. "Eyes in the enemy camp, maybe."

"Let's hope so," Steve said repressively. "Meanwhile what did you find so funny about asking Fury to produce my... Captain America's DNA?"

"Because he doesn’t have any," Tony said. "Nor any records. And if Hank Pym has destroyed the last sample, that's it. Finito."

"And how did Howard know I 'assaulted' – murdered – anyone on the helicarrier?" 

"I told him." Tony took a deep breath.

"You told him. How did you know, Tony? Isn't it time that you levelled with _me_?"

Tony winced. "You're right... Of course you're right. But I thought you might— Never mind. You deserve to know everything. Of course you do. It started when Dad and I saw the helicarrier explode..."

 

_Stark Cabin, Grey Goose Lake. Friday, 7:15 am_

Not for the first time, Steve woke with a morning wood of monumental proportions and memories of dreams that all too frequently involved Tony – Tony in danger, Tony dying, Tony arguing with him, Tony fighting against and beside him, Tony in bed with him... 

It was no use trying to sleep now; the sun was rising. Tony had still been working on his tablet when Steve had retired the night before, so was likely to sleep late. Steve could get rid of his inconvenient erection with a cold shower and Tony would be none the wiser. He pulled on a towelling robe as he headed for the bathroom.

As he padded through the living area he discovered Tony, still fully dressed and curled up on the couch where he had been sitting the night before.

Steve's first feeling was annoyance, but quickly followed by concern. He crushed the impulse to put Tony to bed. Lifting him was certain to wake him. And he dare not touch him, not right now, when his control might slip so easily. Instead he changed course, opened the French doors as quietly as he could, strode across the jetty, dropped the robe and dived straight into the lake.

That took care of his erection. Unfortunately, the feel of the cold water caressing his skin turned to the imagined touch of Tony's metal-clad hands, which threatened to bring it back. Desperately, he put his efforts into concentrating on each stroke: on the beat of his feet and the stretch of his arms, on the dip and turn of his head and how many strokes he was taking between each breath...

It still left room for too many thoughts. Life here was good, but it couldn't go on forever. Sooner or later – probably sooner – Tony was going to realise what a fraud Steve was. And he was still struggling to accept what Tony – and Howard – had done to protect him, not to mention the risks Tony had taken. He remembered vividly how abandoned he had felt when Tony had vanished, leaving him alone in a world he didn't understand, in the care of Howard, whom he hadn't quite trusted.

_I do now._

That was all well and good, but Tony had harboured – was still harbouring – a fugitive he knew had killed, destroying all the evidence of Steve's crime. He hadn't stopped there, but had put himself at risk to destroy government property. If Steve had understood him correctly that property had involved months, perhaps years, of other people's work.

When he had expressed those doubts, Tony had been unrepentant.

_"If you knew the problems that serum has caused over the years you wouldn't have doubts. People have been turned into monsters, died... Besides, they were using you. They had no fucking right to that blood or the serum and I am really scared to think of what they might have done with it."_

Steve had said nothing. He did, though, have the feeling that Captain America would have willingly offered his blood to the government agency.

That would have been even more foolish than he had suspected.

He wondered if the man he was not – the man who had a real claim on the name 'Steve Rogers' as well as Captain America – really had been that stupidly patriotic. He hoped not. There could no doubt that he was wearing that man's body, but their minds – his mind – were not the same.

_I stole his life._

Would that man have fallen in love with Tony? There must be some way to give him the chance, to give him back the life...

_I have no more right to Tony than I have to this body and this name._

He had to give this up, instead of clinging to a stolen friendship and a desire that couldn't be consummated – that he wouldn't allow to be consummated.

The result of this split concentration was that, on his return lap, he didn't see the jetty and his hand struck one of the piers with bruising force, making him yelp.

He jerked back, treading water.

"You okay?" Tony was kneeling at the end of the jetty, looking down at him with a smile on his lips that did not reach the rest of his face. Steve was abruptly reminded that they had parted in anger after last night's shouting match.

Tony held out a hand.

Without thinking, Steve took it.

It was the first time they had ever touched, skin to skin.

A shock of pleasure, of desire, ran through his nerves, his stomach, his veins all cumulating in his groin. His hand wound into Tony's, and Tony gripped back, fierce and desperate, pulling him up onto the jetty.

He was rising into Tony's eyes.

Their lips met in a kiss that was full of need. Then there was nothing but Tony in the entire universe, nothing but Tony and the need for union with him. Tony kissed back just as ferociously, one hand still clasping Steve's, the other raking into his hair. Steve was no longer aware of where they were, just of touch and scent and Tony gasping his name.

 

_Stark Cabin, Grey Goose Lake, New York State. Friday, 9:35am_

In the quiet after the emotional storm, they lay naked on Tony's bed, exhausted but unwilling to sleep in case the other man might vanish and this turn out to be a dream.

Steve had been fighting this for so long – for almost all the time he remembered being alive – that part of him was simply relieved to be free of desire, at least for a little while. The other part – the majority part, if the truth was told – was worried about something else he ought to have thought about before he started this... or allowed Tony to start it. He wasn't quite clear about who had taken the initiative, but looking into Tony's open and relaxed face, he knew who should be taking responsibility.

"You were careful not to mention which birthday party you were celebrating when the helicarrier went down," he said. "Just how old are you?"

Tony groaned, stretched, snuggled against Steve and closed his eyes.

Steve poked him gently.

"Nineteen," was the grudging reply, enough defiance in it to make it believable. "I'm legal in this state, Steve."

Not as bad as Steve had feared, but not good either. "Damn it, the face fungus fooled me. Not to mention you don't act like a teenager."

Tony sighed, but opened his eyes. "We're really doing this now?"

"We should have done this some time ago."

"Okay." Tony shoved himself up on his elbows. "Until I was sixteen I spent most of my time with Dad – I helped run the company, and a lot of our tech was mine. I didn't mix with other kids much. Then Dad died – or we thought he'd died – and I went to live with the Rhodes. But someone had tried to kill us both – had nearly killed me, and I thought they had killed Dad – and our company was being stolen out from under us. The CEO, Obadiah Stane, was using my tech and Dad's to build weapons. Dad had stopped arms production when I was born. He didn't want me to grow up in the shadow of a man who made weapons of mass destruction. Ironic isn't it? Because I built Iron Man and so spawned villains like Titanium Man and Iron Monger and the Mandroids. I didn't build any of them, but they were based on my tech. High school seemed unimportant compared with that. I'm an engineer so I used the battle suit I'd built to equalise the situation."

"You became Iron Man at sixteen?" Despite this confirming what Howard had said, it was still difficult to believe.

"I was lousy at being a high schooler," Tony said, defensively. "My best friends nagged me into building suits for them, the girl I had a crush on turned out to be a supervillain, and so did the boy I had something of a crush on. And I helped him gain more and more power. I lost any chance of control of Stark Industries – and Justin Hammer was ruining it anyway – so I had to found my own company to—"

"Fund your superhero habit?"

"I suppose. It was a wild couple of years. I made friends, but they were mainly with other people in the superhero game, or spies, or mutants, or mad scientists. Then Dad came back and there was an alien invasion. All of Team Iron Man's identities were outed. It had been hard enough pretending to be an adult – now I had to be one and really, really adult at that."

"Hence what appears to be an attempt at a villain goatee?"

"It's a Van Dyke. And I gotta distinguish myself from Dad," Tony said lightly, curling closely into Steve's side. "And how old are you, cradle snatcher?"

"This body is over ninety years old," Steve said, repressively.

"Doesn't act like it," Tony pointed out. "Stop talking as if you and your body are two different—" He stopped in mid-flight for nearly ten seconds, then rolled on top of Steve, pinning him to the mattress. "That's it," he said. "That's what's bothering you. That's why you kept pushing me away. You think I'm in love with the legend of Captain America but you don't really believe you could have been him. Well, I'm not. I'm in love with the man I picked out of the Long Island mud."

"No. No, I don't think that about you," Steve protested. "That's what makes it so terrible. You ask me how old I am, Tony. I don't know! Sometimes I think I was born just over a week ago."

_But I know things I shouldn't – know things the real Steve Rogers shouldn't._

"Shh. Shh," Tony kissed the tears leaking onto his cheeks. "You should have told me. It doesn't matter to me. It's you. Just you."

"And that's not right, either. Two people can't – shouldn't – fall this deeply in love without knowing each other. But you're everything to me, and I can't, I shouldn't..." Even as he spoke, Steve remembered his promise to Howard, to put Tony's welfare first, whatever happened.

_Or am I just thinking that it's his welfare, when its actually mine?._

But Tony's kisses had moved down to his mouth and nothing else really mattered.

 

_Stark Cabin, Grey Goose Lake, New York State. Saturday to Tuesday._

The next four days passed in a dream of pleasure. Even when they weren't naked in bed together, they usually managed to be skin to skin in some way, often just holding hands or cuddling together on the sofa. Tony felt that perhaps Steve had found some peace. Well, he hoped he had found some peace.

He waited for Steve to elaborate on the feelings that had brought him to tears, but he shied away from the subject just as he had previously shied away from Tony's touch.

And at night, if they were not touching, Steve dreamed.

Though Steve claimed not to remember those dreams, they were obviously distressing. Not that Tony's own sleep was untroubled.

The intensity of their passion had shaken Tony. He hadn't been totally inexperienced, but this was beyond what he had ever imagined sex – love – could feel like. But something wasn't right.

He didn't know if Steve felt the same way, because Steve wasn't talking and Tony was too scared of losing him to push. Particularly if he shared the feeling that, however close they became, however wonderful the sex, there was something they couldn't quite reach, something that was missing...

Tony couldn't isolate it, and it was driving him crazy. 

_Alright, think about something else... Find another puzzle, and maybe this one will solve itself in my subconscious. It's happened before. I need something that's testable. Okay, let's start with the way I seem to be pulled back to the cabin. That's easy enough. I'll start by finding out how far we have to hike before it stops. And it's another way to get exhausted without sex. Maybe, when we're out there, I won't feel as if I need to touch Steve all the time, to keep fucking, looking for whatever isn't there._

_Yeah, wouldn't that be peachy._

But it was too late to abandon the idea. Tony just wasn't built that way.

 

_The ridge above Grey Goose Lake, New York State. Wednesday, 9:45am_

Steve edged along the ridge, trying to quash the uneasiness that had nothing to do with a fear of heights. He ought to be watching his feet but couldn't take his eyes off Tony, ready to leap forward if he slipped.

He wished he'd thought harder about agreeing when Tony had proposed this hike to a stone outcrop he had sworn was called the Devil's Ironing Board. Steve was not sure he believed that, any more than he believed that Tony did not have some ulterior motive. Tony knew he enjoyed walking, and being together, and, all too possibly, that he didn't like Tony going off on his own. He needed to be there to protect him.

He was desperately vulnerable without the armour. Except Tony was wearing the backpack that he had said contained the armour and was carrying it as if it weighed nothing. Tony, according to Howard, had himself been enhanced by something called Extremis.

He was certainly setting a sharp pace today.

Perhaps Steve was the vulnerable one. After all, he wasn't Captain America, and, even if this body was enhanced, he didn't have the training to use it.

He did wonder if Tony had noticed that the further they got from the cabin the more jumpy both of them became. If it had just been him, Steve would have understood it better, at least at first, because he didn’t know these woods. He could have easily become lost, but Tony could find his way home in the dark.

Or, more probably the hike was just Tony's excuse to get him alone in the woods and have his way with him... He hoped so, anyway.

 

_The Devil's Ironing Board. Wednesday, 10:40 am_

Lying on the sun-warmed flat rocks behind the ridge that lay to the south of the lake, with Steve at his side, their hands just brushing, Tony should have been reassured. In fact, he was deep in worried thought. It had been a slim chance that becoming lovers would dissipate the cabin's pull. Distance, altitude or a good chunk of solid rock between them had been more hopeful.

It hadn't worked.

Right now, something was urging him to get to his feet, or even to don the armour. Well, least he could rule out separation from Steve as what had been calling him back to the lake house.

"Tony."

"Umm."

"It's nice up here, but I don't fancy making love in the open with all these insects about. There are comfortable beds back at the cabin," Steve added hopefully.

_So Steve does feel it too._

"Sure," Tony said, and allowed himself to be hauled to his feet.

 

As they scrambled back through the forest, he was busy working out just how he was going to raise his suspicions with Steve, or whether he ought to at all.

He had just tripped over a root when Steve caught his arm, raising a finger to his lips, then pointing at the buildings below.

Two horses were tied up in the shadow of the lean-to, swishing their tails against the depredations of the flies. One might have meant Lori, but two...

Tony exchanged glances with Steve and inclined his head towards the rear of the cabin. Steve didn't even nod acknowledgement, just strode forward, leaped up, grasped the guttering, and was on the roof without a sound.

Meanwhile, Tony opened his backpack, dropped it on the ground, and let the armour encase him. Though Steve had disappeared from sight as he made his way across the roof, Tony knew instinctively that he was heading for the skylight that led to the kitchen at the rear.

The cabin's utilities were distressingly old, but the skylight opening mechanism was one of the things he had updated during the period he wasn't making any headway with Steve. Now he used Extremis and the rudimentary house computer to open it as wide as it would go. It would be a squeeze for Steve, but even if he had to force the mechanism he wouldn't make as much noise as breaking the glass would.

Tony rose on his boot jets, quieter than the birdsong and the plop of a fish out in the lake, higher than the roof but not higher than the tops of the trees. He positioned himself above the French doors, then descended vertically at speed, threw the doors wide and raised his hands, palms outwards, repulsors charged.

"Tony! Stop! It's me and Ms Scott!" The voice was familiar and reassuring.

"Rhodey!" Tony did not know at this moment whether to be delighted or horrified that his best friend was standing in the centre of the cabin's living area, coffee dripping from the lip of the mug which he was holding in his hand. Lori, who was sitting on the sofa, reached out a hand and delicately pushed the mug upright with one finger.

Tony threw a glance to where Steve was blocking the entrance to the kitchen and relaxed a little when he shook his head.

No other threats.

Tony let his anger swamp the other emotions. "What the hell, Rhodes?"

"Long story," Rhodey said. His attention having been brought to Steve, he was eyeing him with some suspicion. "You are?"

Judging by Steve's position, leaning against the door frame with his arms folded, showing off an inordinate amount of muscle, that suspicion was returned. "Name's Steve. Function: cook and bodyguard," he said, ignoring Tony's grimace in his direction.

The last thing he wanted was Rhodey and Steve to be mad at each other. It was bad enough that Pepper was – or would be when she realised that Steve was the 'other woman'.

"Steve, this is Jim Rhodes," he said. "War Machine. Part of Team Iron Man, son of Roberta Rhodes, the lawyer in Howard's video. One of my best friends and colleagues. Rhodey, Steve is trustworthy. Dad wouldn't have sent him with me if there were any doubts. Come on, fellas. Stand down. I want to know why Rhodey and Lori are here."

Once he had Rhodey settled on the sofa and had offered beer, which both Steve and Rhodey had refused, he poured himself the large whisky he was sure he was going to need and settled in a chair strategically facing him. Lori, beer in hand, watched with amusement from her perch on the edge of the armchair.

"Okay, Rhodey, spill it." Then, at Rhodes' pointed glance towards Steve, "You can say anything in front of him that you can in front of me. I hope you aren't AWOL from the Air Force Academy, that's all."

Rhodes leaned forward, hands on his knees, his expression earnest. "I have both the Commandant's and the Superintendant's permission to be here. Don't know what's been goin' on, Tony, but Mom's butting heads with Fury, and that's trouble."

"She's acting on Dad's instruction," Tony replied. "Among other things, Fury's trying to get us to pay for building another helicarrier."

Rhodey whistled. "I can see why you're hiding out in the woods. But you have another problem, Tones."

Once he got into his stride, the story flowed out of Rhodey. Pepper, supercharged with hurt and annoyance, and misusing all her Stark Solutions privileges, had hacked into Stark Industries computers and, with familiar intuition, had found all the properties that Stark Industries, Howard Stark and Stark Solutions owned. She had also ascertained that there was property just released from the Trust, now owned directly by Tony.

In triumph, she'd called Rhodey to tell him about it, assuming he was on her side. Rhodey, however, had been horrified that she'd gotten not just into SI's legal Department's files but, through them, to Roberta's home computers.

He had warned her not to give this information to anyone else.

"So, of course," Tony said, with a resigned sigh, "she went directly to Fury."

Rhodey winced. "I hope not," he said, then added, "Probably. What does Fury want from you, Tony? Apart from a new helicarrier?"

"Something that isn't his," Tony replied. "But that list Pep's put together comprises a large number of properties, though most of them are industrial or commercial. Also, some of the ones Mom left me had been sold by the trustees. How did you figure out where I was?"

"I've been here before, remember? That summer when Mom had been ill and Howard sent her and my father out here for a vacation."

"He did? I don't remember that," Tony said.

"Well, I was only seven, man, and so were you. Made more of an impression on me. So once I'd figured it out I flew here as War Machine. I couldn't spot you from the air, so I left the armour in the woods and headed for the farm. But I, well..."

"He'd gotten lost," Lori said. "I was bringing up some more supplies when I met him. I listened to him, moved the packs to my mare then stuck him on the packhorse, and brought him up here. Figured you could handle him."

"Anyone else know where you are?" Tony asked.

"Whaddaya take me for?" For a moment Rhodey sounded angry but then his voice softened. "I just wanted to know you were okay."

"You're at the Air Force Academy?" Steve said. "Doesn't that put you under military discipline?"

Rhodey glared at him. "It's education, man."

"Yeah, but you still might have to answer to the Pentagon, and there are people in the USAF that I don't trust any more than I trust SHIELD," Tony said.

"Me either," Rhodey agreed, unexpectedly. "But isn't it better to undermine the bad from within rather than fight it head on from outside?

Tony wasn't at all sure how to answer that, and Steve said nothing. "You worked hard for that Academy place," Tony said finally, "and I sure as hell don't want to put that in jeopardy."

Rhodey shrugged. "You haven't. It's not about you, Tony. It'll take a while for me to get into a position to help, but when you do need me, I'll be there."

All Tony could do in response was to hug him.

"Hey, quit breaking my ribs!"

"One more thing you ought to know," Lori said. "I had a visit from SHIELD."

_Christ!_

"What happened?" Tony demanded.

"I played the horse-crazy woman to perfection," Lori said. "That pair now know far more about breeding Arabs and Andalusians than they ever wanted to."

"Pair?" Tony asked, though he was certain he knew.

"Man and a woman. Blond and redhead. Guy was talkative but the woman was in charge."

"Clint and Natasha?" Rhodey asked, looking worried. "They aren't easy to fool."

"They had a list, and I was only halfway down it," Lori said. "I had the impression they weren't looking that hard. They friends of yours, Tony?"

"I hope so," Tony said.

_I really hope so._

 

While Steve and Lori watered the horses and stowed the fresh supplies in the refrigerator and freezer, Rhodey pulled Tony aside. "Tones, what is going on?"

"I can't tell you."

"No, you can. You just won't." Rhodey's voice dripped with disappointment.

"I'm trying to protect you! I told you I won't put your career, or Pepper's, in jeopardy."

Rhodey was looking really worried now. "What the hell have you been up to?"

Tony shook his head. "What you don't know, you can't be pressured to reveal. I don't want you torn between your friendship with me and the Air Force. Or the law."

"It wouldn't be the first time," Rhodey pointed out.

"It would be the first time since you hit the Academy." Tony squeezed his elbow. "I know what I'm doing."

"And that would also be a first."

"Sure, buddy." Tony's smile died away. "What about Pepper? Has she gone back to UCLA?"

"Not yet. She's spending a lot of time with Happy."

"No doubt banging his ear about what a shit I've been to her," Tony said. It was kinda true.

"Not everything is about you, Tones."

"Well at least he's never minded her bossing him around," Tony said, but he was relieved all the same. Happy was a steadying influence in Pepper's life, far more so than he could ever be, and Happy deserved some good luck.

 

_Stark Cabin, Grey Goose Lake, New York State. Wednesday, 2:20 pm._

Once Rhodes and Lori had gone, the former clutching a map of the area with the position of the armour's electronic signature marked, the latter to make her excuses to her family and employees, Steve took Tony's hand and led him into the living area.

During their early days in the cabin Steve had discovered he loved watching Tony work. More importantly, he knew that once his friend was engaged in research or design, or had a problem to solve, everything else would be pushed into the background. Right now seemed a good time to encourage him to pick up his tablet again. 

Once Tony had settled in, Steve reached for the yellowing sketch pad and pencils he had found tucked away at the bottom of a chest of drawers. He had discovered, much to his surprise, that he could draw.

As Tony's concentrated features emerged from his scratching pencil, he wondered if the original Steve Rogers had shared this skill. Was it what Tony and Howard had called his ability to fight – muscle memory?

_Because he isn't me._

Each day with Tony had been a gift, and now each night was a treasure.

He didn't deserve him. Tony thought he was a hero, but he wasn't...

He wasn't Steve Rogers, let alone Captain America.

How had his mind come to be imposed on this body – and, more importantly, how could that imposition be reversed? If he knew what had triggered it he might be able to take the first step to correcting it.

For that he would need Tony's help, couldn't imagine solving the problem without that brilliant mind working on it. Only telling him what he believed would be stabbing him to the heart. 

_I don't want to leave. Don't want to hurt you. I've hurt enough people already. But, in the end, I have to do what's right_

His hand jerked and as the lead in the pencil he had been digging into the page snapped.

Though he would have sworn that Tony was engrossed in his work, the other man looked up at the sound. His expression changed from concentration to concern in an instant, and then he was crossing the room to Steve's side.

Steve tossed aside the pad and his concerns at the same moment. Damning the consequences, he almost leaped into Tony's arms.

 

Later, much later, Steve herded Tony into the kitchen and set him chopping some of the fresh vegetables Lori had brought for them. He wasn't sure what they were going to eat – risotto, maybe – but it kept Tony close and gave him something to do that wasn't sex.

They worked in silence for a while, then Steve said, "What happens if SHIELD turns up here?"

"Depends. If it's Natasha and Clint, we talk. If it isn't we run 'em off the ranch."

Steve swung to face him. "And that's gonna work?"

Tony was watching his hands and the knife with unnecessary concentration. "I'll back the two of us against them."

"You still think I'm this Captain America, don't you?"

Tony's knife continued its precise clatter against the board. "According to Dr Henry Pym you have Captain America's DNA, and, according to Dad, you have his powers and skill set."

"But not his memories. All I have are traces of memory of you or someone like you that I can't even access without the help of a telepath. And the real Captain America was brain dead. Something happened, Tony, to put my mind in his body. I need to find out who did it."

There was a long silence. Finally, "It may have been me," Tony said, his voice choked.

Steve stared at him in total astonishment. "What?"

"There's an alien device – machine – artefact, I don't know. A... friend of mine sent it to me because he couldn't figure out anything about it, couldn't make it do anything. Neither could I, until I touched it by accident, had a really weird experience. Soon after, you woke up."

Steve couldn't really see the connection. "Has anyone else touched it and experienced the same effects?" he asked cautiously.

Tony considered. "Yes to the first question, no to the second."

"Then I don't see how you get from you touching the device to me being in this body. And how can you be sure your 'weird experience' was a result of touching it?"

Tony glared at him. "Because it's affecting us right now. It insisted I bring it here with me and I'm certain it's what's been calling us back here to the cabin. Maybe it even has something to do with our... relationship."

Steve was horrified. "You don't really believe that?"

"I don't know what I believe. I don't have a strong enough hypothesis, and very few facts to verify it, or any other."

There was only one way to get to the bottom of this.

"Show me," Steve said.

Tony grimaced, but got to his feet and walked swiftly into his bedroom, Steve following at his heels. Once there, he donned a pair of heavy workman's gloves, then opened the closet and unzipped his bag.

Steve's heart unaccountably started racing as Tony reached into the bag with his left hand and drew out a rectangular object about eighteen inches long. It appeared to be made of dull blue metal, inlaid with inscriptions or possibly simply designs in what could have been oxidised copper. Near each end was a circle or button, one green, one blue, each about an inch in diameter, set flush with the metal. Beyond that, the artefact narrowed and changed from a square section to a circular one, in what might have been handgrips and would certainly serve as them.

Steve stretched out a hand to touch it, but Tony caught his wrist with his free hand. "Don't, Steve. You don't know what it will do."

"You said other people touched it without anything happening."

"Yeah, but I ended up on the floor of the workshop having what I thought were hallucinations."

"What sort of hallucinations?"

"I was... I was searching for... something. Somethings. I think at the end everything came together and, just for a moment, I knew I'd succeeded, that I'd found it. I was... well, whole. Then I wasn't. When I woke up in the workshop only seconds had passed. And I had a splitting headache. Which you do not want."

"You weren't wishing for anything in particular, were you?" Steve asked, then held his breath.

"No," Tony said firmly. "I stumbled and touched it by accident. I wasn't wishing for anything. So I'm not Ali Baba and this isn't a magic lamp." 

Steve let out the breath, trying to control it so that Tony didn't realise he was doing it. "Was that at the same time as I woke up?"

Tony shook his head. "Must have been earlier, I guess. Maybe an hour or so." He brightened. "Which suggests I may be imagining a connection after all."

Steve nodded. _But I don't think so. Because I can feel its pull from here._

Apparently satisfied, Tony replaced the artefact in the bag and the bag in the closet. "Let's go eat," he suggested, with a grin. "Or at least, cook. I'll be interested what you think you're going to do with all those veggies."

So was Steve.

 

All the same, try as he might, Steve couldn't let it rest.

That night, in bed with Tony's head resting on his shoulder as the other man fiddled with a tablet, he raised the subject again.

"Y'know...this thing... device... whatever – I mean, you're Tony Stark. You must be able to find out how it works."

Tony groaned, and laid the tablet aside. "That's what Gene – the guy who sent it to me – thought. He was wrong. Not for the first time, either."

Steve took a deep breath. Tony had levelled with him. He could not, in all conscience, keep his own reasoning from him. "I stole this body, Tony, whether that device put me here or not. I can't keep it, not if there's a chance of giving it back to its rightful owner."

Tony turned his head so his face was hidden against Steve's shoulder, but his fingers were biting deep into muscle, as if he could hold Steve here by sheer force of will, and his whole body was shaking, each breath a gasp. "Isn't," he said petulantly.

 _He's just a kid,_ Steve told himself, even as he fought to hold off his own tears and buried his face in Tony's hair. But he knew it wasn't true. That Tony had left his childhood behind when he'd lost his father and his world at sixteen. Steve himself was younger, nineteen years younger.

"Tony, you must know how much I want to stay with you," he said now, "but this body isn't mine. Maybe... maybe even your love, this strange bond between us, isn't mine either. Maybe, when you meet him—"

Tony raised his head, and his eyes, bluer than the sky, than sapphires, were blazing with anger and grief. "What sort of... of... fickle coward do you think I am? Don't try to palm some sort of substitute off on me, Steve. _He doesn't exist._ Draining the serum just made you slow to heal."

"Doesn't explain the memories – memories of you – that Xavier saw in my mind."

"Okay, okay. Even if the device put you there – and I can't think how or why because I wasn't thinking about you, hadn't thought about Captain America for _months_ – your body was _brain dead_. Your cerebral cortex wasn't operating. It didn't re-boot until the serum had healed it. Which is a perfectly good explanation for your loss of memory! If they hadn't wanted the serum they'd have turned off life support a year ago. So even if this stupid theory of yours is right, Steve, he's dead. If he ever existed at all."

"Tony—"

"Even if you were right, you're not Jesus Christ. And if by some unknown miracle you did manage to resurrect the dead, he'd never set foot in my life. However short that might be because I don't think I could survive without you." 

"You would." Steve protested. "You're..." _Young. You'd get over it. Only I'm younger. I want to stay with you. Live with you. Only it isn't right._

And Steve was suddenly afraid, that he would die and that the body he occupied would die, and Tony would be left alone. Or maybe it was that he'd give in to that temptation, become a thief as well as a murderer.

_But maybe, maybe, that device did bring me here into this body. If the device responded to Tony it may respond to me. God, it's tempting. Maybe it can find the real Steve Rogers... I need to examine it, touch it, see if it responds to me like it did to Tony._

But Steve fell asleep while waiting for Tony to do the same.

 

_Stark Cabin, Grey Goose Lake, New York State. Thursday, 3:00 am_

Later that night, while Steve slept, Tony, wearing the Iron Man gauntlets, wrapped the artefact tightly in plastic and threw it in the lake.

 

_The forest around Grey Goose Lake, New York State. Thursday, 11:46 am._

Tony was following in Steve's tracks as they explored the woods on the other side of the valley from the Devil's Ironing Board, for once happy that the other man couldn't watch him closely. Even better, that conversation was practically impossible.

Steve hadn't mentioned the artefact over breakfast or asked to see it, which Tony figured meant that he had already discovered it was gone. Maybe he even guessed what he had done the night before. Of course, he would also guess that Tony could retrieve the artefact any time he wished – and he would have to in the end, or Gene would want to know why. The last thing he needed now was a fight with the Mandarin.

Tony also suspected that Steve couldn't make up his mind whether to be relieved or furious. 

_Tony!_ said a voice that was not his or Steve's but female and familiar and _in his head_ when the hills around where empty of human life.

_Steve! Where are you? I'm in your lake house._

Steve's eyes were wide, "That's—"

"Jean." Tony took off at a run, slithering down-slope towards the lake. He could hear Steve's feet following, coming closer, and then the other man was past him, running at a pace he could not hope to match.

Tony gritted his teeth and accelerated, hoping to keep in touch with Steve, who was hurdling fallen logs as if he was in an athletics steeplechase. Ahead the land dipped towards the lake, and then both of them were scrambling on scree and years of accumulated needles, using the trees as brakes and handholds.

And all the time Jean's voice spoke in his mind. _Fury turned up at the school. He knew Tony had come to see him with Steve and he was there to find out what the Professor had learned about Steve – who he was. The true answer – 'nothing' – wasn't going to satisfy Fury, so the Prof me told to warn Tony or his father._

The lake lay below them.

As Tony approached the cabin, he could not see any sign of how Jean – if it was Jean – could have reached it. No horses were visible this time. Their own SUV, parked under the lean-to, was the only visible auto, there were no canoes or boats, let alone a seaplane or 'copter on the lake, nor had there been any sound of engines of any kind. The forest around was undisturbed.

Steve took a flying leap that landed him on the jetty and sprinted towards the French doors. "Wait—" Tony began, but then Steve was inside, without even a glance behind him.

_Shit!_

Surprised once again at his own stamina – because he certainly didn't work out – Tony circled round the back of the cabin and entered through the kitchen door.

That room was empty.

Tony plunged on into the living area, to find Jean, in navy and yellow spandex, smiling at Steve. Behind her stood a much younger girl, in jeans and tee, with a mass of blonde hair and a fierce expression.

"—so I got Illyana to teleport me, Scott and Hank to your house," Jean was saying in her ordinary voice. "I knew immediately you weren't there, but Tony's – hi, Tony – father was." She grinned happily at him. "He had taken refuge in your armoury because of two people trying to get in. One of them was Doctor Doom—

"Doom's dead," Tony said. "Must be a Doombot. Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference."

Jean looked puzzled. "But I could read his mind," she protested, "though it was the strangest I've encountered. He certainly believed he was Doom. The woman with him was shielded, but what little I could read suggested something even odder. I don't think she was human."

"Is Dad okay? You didn't leave him to face them alone?" Tony's voice was urgent.

"My guys didn't wait for me to say anything. Nothing could have stopped them tackling Doom. I suggested telepathically to your Dad to leave them to it. I stole your location from his mind. I'm sorry, but—"

"Forget that. I'm fucking grateful. Can your friend take us home?

"Yes. Possibly even back in time to when Doom first arrived. But here's the thing, Tony, Doom or the Doombot wasn't after you or your armour or even Steve, but some sort of magical thing or person—

Illyana suddenly lifted her head. "Someone comes," she said, in a voice that held more than a trace of a Russian accent.

Two figures were forming in the centre of the room.

Tony used Extremis to call his own armour, grateful he had left it standing in his bedroom and didn't have to struggle with the backpack.

Even as it flew in, he heard Jean say, "Illyana, get out of here. Go back to the Professor and— no, go _now_." 

A glowing disk had formed under Illyana's hands. She stepped into it, and vanished.

She was only just in time. Doom – or whatever facsimile it happened to be – was now fully materialised, and an unknown woman – white haired, slim to the point of thinness, ethereal, lovely, definitely alien – stood beside him. She did not look happy to be there. 

The Doombot scanned the room. "Where is it?" it demanded.

"You'd think," Iron Man said to the room at large, as Tony ignored the sinking feeling in his stomach and the pounding of his heart, "that after all this time Doom might have programmed a few more words into his robots' vocabulary. Still, like creator, like robot."

"Is that," Steve answered, from where he was standing with his arms folded, looking down his nose at the Doombot, "why your computer is so keen on lecturing me?"

Jean laughed. "Take it from me, the limited vocabulary is a bonus. You'd know that if you'd been lectured by Professor X."

The Doombot ignored all three of them. "The thing of magic you are hiding. Where is it?" it demanded.

"I don't know what you are talking about," Tony said airily. "There's no such thing _as_ magic—"

"Is there not?" The Doombot waved its arm, and Tony's armour clattered to the floor at his feet.

"Magic of magnetism," Tony said, but he was shaken. From the moment he'd walked into the room he'd been trying to take control of the Doombot's circuits via Extremis, and failing. Now this... thing... controlled his armour, apparently without effort. 

He tried to take a step forward, to confront it, but he was frozen in place, his body refusing to obey him.

It was then that the pain began, spreading out from his chest. But Tony had endured a damaged heart, had been dying when Mallen had torn out the reactor the armour had used to save him, that had been keeping him alive.

_I... can... endure... this._

Jean was on her knees, her head in her hands.

And Steve...

Steve was hanging onto the back of a sofa, his face contorted in pain.

"Where is it?" the Doombot demanded again.

"I... don't... know..." Steve gasped. Which was literally true. Sort of.

"Out of your reach," Tony said. Also true. He hoped. At least his words might ease the pressure on Steve.

It didn't.

Instead, the Doombot turned its red eyes to the woman at his side. "Call it to me, Clea."

It was then that Tony's pain lessened as the woman fought the command, unmoving, her lips pressed together. The tight fitting necklet she wore had began to glow, its inset white stones shining with a nacred light, forming unknown words.

Then the woman's face lost all expression. She said two unintelligible words and then the artefact, in its plastic wrapping, appeared floating in the air in front of her, dripping water. Even as the Doombot reached for it, it jerked into flight, straight towards Tony. The Doombot reacted by throwing one its balls of energy at Jean, and she and the artefact crashed to the floor simultaneously.

The Doombot clanked across to the fallen artefact, lifted it in its hands and unwrapped it. "This is a thing of great power," it said, its eyes turning to Tony. "It is unsuited to you. This belongs to Doom, who will use it to retrieve his family's souls."

"Doom's dead," Tony said. He was finding that, like Jean, he could sort of reach into the Doombot's – and it was a Doombot – electronic systems but could not control its mind. Damn it, there were just too many organics.

"Doom lives," the Doombot stated, as if there could be no contradiction. "You, Stark, will kneel before Doom and serve him—"

"Nope. Not gonna happen."

"You are distracted, your Excellency," Clea interrupted. There were beads of sweat on her forehead and, though the glow of the necklet had faded a little, she was still plainly in pain. "Once you have mastered the artefact, Stark will do your will."

Tony forced himself to grin. "Only you can't master this device, because it needs to be touched by bare skin. I can testify to that. But you can't do that, can you? Because you're encased in steel, scared of your body—"

The Doombot pulled off the right hand gauntlet, revealing a skeletal hand covered by what looked too much like pale skin for Tony's peace of mind.

_What if I'm wrong?_

The hand closed round the artefact. There was a ring on its finger, a yellow gold band with a jet-black stone set amid sharp points...

_Oh my God... No! No, wait, Doombot. Doombot. A robot can't use that ring. Even Doom couldn't use it the last time he had his gauntlets on it, not without a load of technology. Maybe it's another fake._

 

_Stark Cabin, Grey Goose Lake, New York State. Thursday, 12:04_

Every muscle in Steve's body was tensed, as he cursed his helplessness. If he had really been Captain America he would have been able to protect Tony and Jean, help Clea, but... he... could... not.

The Doombot was staring down at the artefact, grasping it so tightly that it seemed to Steve that he was trying to crush it.

Nothing was happening. 

Well, Tony had said it didn't always react.

Jean had raised herself on her elbows, which was more than Steve could do. "You are not Victor Von Doom," she said. "He's dead. He created you and others in his image and let you all believe you were the real Doom. But you aren't."

Steve saw Tony's eyes go black, dangerous and... inhuman, dancing with specks of light that looked oddly like lines of reversed text.

One of the Iron Man gauntlets lying on the floor suddenly hummed to life. The fingers clenched, moving the palm so it was pointing at Doom. Instantly, the repulsor flashed.

The Doombot staggered back, howling in fury, its unprotected hand blasted to smithereens. The artefact, unharmed, clattered to the floor.

Something else fell, something small, gold and black and gleaming, which rolled across the floor until brought up short at the edge of the rug on which the coffee table stood.

But they could investigate that later. 

Suddenly able to move, Steve flung himself across the room and snatched at the Doombot's remaining hand, holding it still, his muscles straining against an enhanced strength that might exceed his own.

A ball of light exploded from the palm throwing them both into the wall, but Steve hung on.

 

_Stark Cabin, Grey Goose Lake, New York State. Thursday, 12:09 am._

Tony had stopped firing because he didn't have enough control to avoid hitting Steve – and the limited power in the gauntlet was running out. He could only watch the struggle in horror, knowing that if the Doombot managed to twist free just for an instant Steve would be dead.

The attack was suicidal.

_Maybe that's what Steve wants._

Even as the thought crossed his mind he saw the heavy gold collar around Clea's neck unclasp and descend slowly and silently to the floor.

Tony called to the armour, relief flowing through him as it responded. But he diverted it so, instead of encasing him, it enfolded Steve, except for the other gauntlet, which flew to Tony's bare hand.

Jean, also freed from the spell, rose vertically into the air, her hair lifting around her in a cloud of fire as she flung out a hand and invisible force tore the metal mask from the Doombot's face, revealing another, more human mask beneath, then peeled that away so that a humming mixture of wires and pulsing flesh was exposed.

And Clea was chanting as rings of red light flew from her hands to encircle the Doombot, imprisoning its arms, cutting through the armour. 

The boot jets fired, lifting Steve away even as Tony fired both repulsors at the Doombot's neck.

Steve, even protected by the Iron Man armour, was tossed through the air as the Doombot's head separated from its body, but Tony and Clea continued the attack until there was nothing left of the robot's body but metal shards, burnt out electronics, and what looked, and smelled, like grilled meat.

Leaving it to Clea to finish up, Tony glanced at Jean to make sure she was all right – judging by the way she was frowning at a tear in her costume, he didn’t think she was in any distress. When the tear miraculously mended itself, he was certain of it.

He ran to Steve's side. "Computer, scan Steve for injury," he ordered.

"I'm fine," Steve snapped, in a voice muffled by the faceplate. "Except I can't breathe or think with all these flashing lights. How do you get the damn thing off?" He clasped the helmet in both hands.

"Wait!" Tony didn't want to test whether the armour would stand up to super-soldier strength. It would be a pain to get the dents out without the facilities of the armoury. He ordered the armour to retract not just the faceplate but the whole of the helmet.

Steve was red-faced but otherwise unharmed, as the armour's computer confirmed. He tried to stand, but the armour hampered him so much Tony had to grab an arm to help him. "What was that about, Tony? The armour is there to protect you."

"Actually, it's not. It's there to make me even more badass," Tony retorted.

"You could have been killed!"

"Without it, you certainly would have been."

"Boys!" Jean said. "Stop arguing. It worked. We're all alive. Be thankful."

"I am extremely thankful, my dear," Clea said, pushing back the two long curls that had fallen onto her forehead, so they stood up above the rest of her hair like twisted horns. "And this is no time for any of us to quarrel."

"It's just relief," Jean said. "Believe me, I'm on a team of testosterone filled teens, and I know."

"I'm not the one starting a fight," Tony said.

"That's familiar too." Jean's grin was widening.

"I owe my freedom to all three of you, so thank you," Clea said. "I did not believe an artificial creature could have such magical power. An embarrassing mistake and one I will not make again."

"That wasn't a normal Doombot," Tony said. "It was a mixture of tech and programmed organics. That's why Jean could read its mind and I could sense the tech, but neither of us could control it."

Jean took a breath. "I don't control—"

"Master. Yogthulu. I call you." The voice, cracked and lifeless, came from across the room, from the battered head of the Doombot. 

The black Makluan ring was glowing with power, and, before it, a familiar blindingly-bright portal was forming.

"No!" Tony shouted, turning to face it. "All of you, get out of here. Run, right now, and keep running."

Needless to say, they did no such thing.

Clea blasted the Doombot's head into smithereens, but it was too late.

Tony took a step towards the portal, then half a step back, as from its blinding brightness, a nightmare head was emerging, studded with many sickly green eyes, red pincers and short tentacles or possibly antennae surrounding a slitted mouth, large enough, as Tony knew, to swallow a human with ease. He'd seen Doom snatched up into it. Behind that head, he also knew, was vast segmented body, many legged and armoured.

Yogthulu. The creature-from-another-dimension that Doom had summoned in order to trade three pure souls, three lives – Tony, Howard and Gene – for Doom's own dead loved ones. Yogthulu, who had rejected the offering because Gene was not pure, in whatever definition of 'pure' the extraterrestrial – extra-dimensional – being was using. The creature that had swallowed Doom.

But Gene wasn't here now. Tony had already used Extremis and the armour to send a message to Gene's email account when he had identified the Makluan ring. There had been no response and he had not really expected an immediate one. It had been more a heads up for the Mandarin to collect his property. Tony wanted nothing to do with that particular ring.

Last time they had encountered it he had spent the whole of his time with Gene trying to keep the rings out of the Mandarin's hands. Things had certainly changed.

Yogthulu's head and first few segments had emerged; the room wasn't big enough to take the whole creature, though Tony was sure it would simply break through the roof if it felt like it.

Worse, there was a thing standing beside its first segment. It had once been human. Now, though, it had very little skin, some of which had been replaced by a covering too white and shiny to be anything but artificial. Elsewhere it was just flayed flesh. There was a hole in its skull, too, and Tony saw there was no brain tissue behind it.

He suddenly knew where the Doombot's organics had come from, and felt sick.

_Is that Doom? His was one of the greatest minds on Earth. The monster's reduced him to this._

He swallowed hard, determined not to throw up.

_Such a fuckin' waste._

Yogthulu's head moved from side to side, its massive pincers stirring the air less than a foot from Tony's face. He heard the armour clank behind him so Steve was moving it by sheer muscle power. Somehow, without looking, Tony knew he had halted just behind his right shoulder. Clea, an expression of determination on her face, stood a couple of feet away. Jean, she informed him telepathically, was rising into the air at their backs.

 _What is that thing?_ she asked.

"A demon," Clea said. "An ancient nightmare. Eater of souls."

"A hostile alien from another dimension," Tony said, at much the same time. "Though I won't dispute that it eats people."

The great head turned towards Clea, ignoring Tony. "Princess of the Dark Dimension, this is none of your concern."

"Is it not? When your minion _used_ me. Attempted to control me."

"You are not of this dimension."

"But I am of this universe. As are you. As is my uncle Dormammu. He may not love me, but he would regard an attack on me as a grave insult to the Dark Dimension."

"He is nothing. But your soul has Darkness in it, witch. The other souls are mine." 

"Tony," Steve's voice was as low as he could make it and still be heard through the faceplate. "Call your armour back."

_Not a chance. Wait, what's flayed-Doom doing?_

A push of Yogthulu's articulated leg had sent the mutilated man staggering towards the artefact, which promptly twitched, then rolled casually under the nearest chair.

Yogthulu's great head turned towards Jean.

And Tony moved with it, without thought, between the girl and the monster, powering up the palm repulsors as he did so.

He heard Steve yell, "Tony!" With what he supposed was his last thought, as Yogthulu reared up, tentacles brushing the rafters of the double height room, Tony set the armour to respond to Steve. He faced the monster, hands raised, palms out, though he knew he didn't have enough power to do anything more than irritate it.

 _Why hasn't it snatched me up?_ Tony wondered, even as he kept his eyes directly on whichever of Yogthulu's happened to be nearest, wondering if he could at least take a few of them out.

Behind him, he heard the boot jets fire up. Then, suddenly, the room blazed with blinding light as the unibeam fired over his head, striking Yogthulu on its opened mouth.

In the personal darkness that followed, he felt himself grabbed from the rear, only it wasn't flesh that was snatched but his tee shirt as he was hauled into the air.

Steve! Steve was still in the armour.

But he could feel they were out of control, the Iron Man moving upwards far too quickly.

 _Switch off the jets!_ That was Jean's telepathic call.

Tony reached out with Extremis as they rolled sideways, realising was Steve trying to avoid crashing through the roof. Trusting that Jean had this, he cut the power to the boot jets.

They fell, but only for a couple of feet before their descent slowed.

With his returning vision he saw that they were being put down a couple of feet from the doors.

 _Thank you, Jean,_ he thought, hoping she would catch the heartfelt message.

 _No problem,_ came the immediate response.

 

_Stark Cabin, Grey Goose Lake, New York State. Thursday, 12:24 am_

Inside the armour, Steve was shaking with terror. When this was over he was going to give Tony the tongue-lashing of his life, but right now he wanted to grab him and fly him hundreds of miles from danger. Except that he no longer had control of the Iron Man armour. Not that he had had much control of it before.

At least the suit computer had warned him to close his eyes when he had fired the unibeam at full power.

But they weren't out of danger yet. Quickly scanning the room, he saw that the monster – demon, Clea had called it – had partially pulled back into the circle of light from which it had emerged. It was batting Clea's magical bolts away as she continued to bombard it. Jean was floating towards them. And the monster's mutilated servant—

Desperately, Steve caught Tony's arm and pointed to where it had abandoned the artefact and, instead, was beside the coffee table, bending to pick up the black-stoned ring.

The ring that had created the portal.

And now Tony was shaking under his hand, saying, "Fuck" over and over again.

"Do not touch the ring." The voice was harsh, coming from an inhumanly tall figure in strange, spiky black armour that had appeared from nowhere. Even with the head of Yogthulu in the room, he filled the rest of it. 

Clea, her eyes wide, turned towards him, lifting her hands.

The intruder held out his own hand and the ring leaped into it. 

Yogthulu lunged forward, snatching up its mutilated servant in its pincers.

"Mandarin!" Tony shouted. "Close the portal."

After that, things happened almost too fast to follow.

Yogthulu jerked backwards

The – Mandarin? – raised his left hand, where the black-stoned ring had settled in the midst of four others, all with their separate gems. 

The portal snapped shut, leaving behind a trail of red – splinters of red pincers, still-waving red tentacles – and the lower half of a tortured human body, lying in a pool of blood on the parquet floor.

Jean made a gagging sound and turned away.

Clea's face was blank.

"Not sure how we're gonna get the stain out," Tony said.

The Mandarin waved a hand at the blood and it vanished, along with the severed legs and abdomen.

"Well, that answers that. How the fuck did you let a Doombot get ahold of that ring, Gene?" Tony demanded.

In an eyeblink the massive alien-like humanoid was transformed into a tall young man, as tall as Steve himself, but as dark as Steve was fair. He appeared to be Chinese or Japanese to Steve's untrained eye, but was clad in slacks and a black shirt with a dragon motif. Only his tinted glasses set him apart.

"I made a mistake," he admitted. "Pepper – Rescue – turned up at my door just after I'd sent that odd device over there to you. She... er... don't get upset about this, Stark, but she was all over me. I didn't realise the ring had gone until after you left. She must have taken it."

"No, she didn't, because it wasn't her."

"Well I know that now, Stark. I made it my business to track Pepper down and she'd been attending classes in LA when she was apparently with me."

"The girl was probably Whitney," Tony said. "She must have stolen the ring to try and make up for not finding the artefact. Did you tell her I had it? She turned up at home with a Doombot in tow. Dad and Steve destroyed that one and took her into custody."

"She didn't ask about the artefact specifically, but she did ask if you and I were in touch. I thought she was playing away and didn't want you to know. I'm sorry."

"That's okay." Tony grinning widely. "Right now I'd forgive you even if it had been Pepper. Who I'm not dating, by the way. If you want to cut in, it's Happy who you should worry about. He packs a mean punch nowadays."

"I'm not worried about either you or Happy," Gene retorted, but he was also smiling. "I am annoyed about you not warning me you were tussling with Yogthulu."

"Things got a little hectic around here. To be honest, I'm surprised there was anyone here to save when you arrived."

"It was scared," Jean said.

"What? Yogthulu?" Tony sounded sceptical.

"Yes. Scared of you and Steve. Something to do with that hunk of metal." She waved a dismissive hand towards the artefact. 

"Do you want it back, Gene?" Tony asked, with a mixture of hope and apprehension.

"Not on your life," Gene said hurriedly. "That thing practically screamed 'send to Tony Stark' at me. Not to mention earned me a visit from Madame Masque. No. It's all yours. Now, are you going to introduce me to your friends?"

 

_Stark Cabin, Grey Goose Lake, New York State. Thursday, 12.43 pm_

Once he had made a perfunctory round of introductions, Tony rounded on Steve. "Computer," he snapped. "Scan Steve again, at once."

"Steve has suffered contusions and a strained shoulder, all of which are healing at his accelerated rate."

"Do you need a sling for the shoulder?" Tony asked Steve, because yelling at him could wait.

"No. I'm fine, Tony. Really."

Clea was regarding Steve with an inquisitive, almost clinical expression. "You are not the original inhabitant of that body," she said suddenly.

Tony saw Steve wince and rushed to his defence. "You can't be sure. He's lost his memory—"

"What am I then?" Steve asked Clea, ignoring Tony. "Some sort of demon? Have I sold my soul—?"

"There's no such thing as a 'soul'," Tony protested.

"No?" Gene's eyebrows were raised. "What did Yogthulu want you, me and Howard for but to eat our souls?"

He had a point, but Tony wasn't going to accept that. "It's just a metaphor."

Clea rolled her eyes at both of them. "Not in this case. 'Soul' isn't a precise term but it's the only one you have in human languages. It can mean many things. Try this: the body creates the mind and the mind shapes the soul."

"Is that so?" The scepticism now came from Gene.

"Yes. In most humans when the body dies, the mind dies too, and the soul energy shatters and is returned to the fabric of the universe. There is no consciousness there, but the fragments carry faint memories and are drawn to minds with aspects that match their own structure. An infant human collects soul energy in its first year. Others, particularly those that carry magic, have souls that hold together even after death." She was still staring at Steve. "Your mind is mainly human," she told him

_Christ! Don't add that to his guilt._

"Mainly! He's fully human," Tony insisted. "Charles Xavier certainly thought so!"

"The Sorcerer Supreme has spoken of Charles Xavier. I have to defer to so distinguished a telepath if he says he saw a human mind. But I also trust my own magic. Your friend is also at home in that particular body. He may have been born into something very sim—"

Steve had the stubborn look Tony had come to dread. "So I have usurped the body of another man – by all accounts a good man, a hero." 

_Steve's going to lose it,_ Tony thought. Then, _I'm going to lose him._

"Steve..." he said.

"Even that name is borrowed! I don't remember how it happened but that has to be my fault. There has to be a way to get him back, to make it right."

Tony winced. _Say there isn't,_ he thought savagely at Clea. _Even if there is, say there isn't._

What Clea said was, "And if there is not? If there is no blame in staying here with your soulmate?"

" _Soul_ mate?" Tony's knew his scepticism was obvious, but there were limits to how much unscientific mysticism he was going to stand for. "There's no such thing."

Steve's eyes were screwed shut. "Don't tempt me like that! Help me bring him back."

"Him?" Clea asked.

"The person who should be in this body," Steve said. "I – we think that when Tony touched the artefact it brought me here. Can you help us reverse the process – send me to wherever I was and bring him back?"

Clea's silver brows wrinkled in puzzlement. She stretched out a hand towards Steve, fingers spread. "You... are an enigma. You read both young and very old, weak and powerful. And then..." The hand moved towards Tony and her eyes widened. "I don't know what you are. I don't know what he is." Her chin went up, "But I know you belong together." She turned to Steve. "If you die, do you suppose your soul-mate here would survive for long?"

Steve frowned. "What?"

"Do not try to pretend when I can see the bond between you as clear as if it was in the Eye of Agamotto. That is so rare among humans that I would have said it was unheard of, certainly in this strength. You read each other's emotions, each other's thoughts, don't you?"

"Not that I've noticed," Tony said, even as Steve said,

"I guess. Maybe. A little. Not clearly."

Clea picked up the artefact from where it lay on the floor and examined it critically. "This is... Where did this come from?"

"I found it," Gene said. "In a chamber of a Makluan temple I thought I had already explored. It isn't Makluan, though. I examined it, but couldn't work out what it was or what it did. So I passed it on to the person who might be able to."

"Tony," Steve said.

"No. It is not Makluan," Clea agreed. "It is not, I think, of this particular universe. It comes from elsewhere. Perhaps even from the first universe from which our local multiverse sprang."

"Dr Richards thinks that we're part of a multiverse," Tony said. "But our universe is at least thirteen and a half billion years old."

"And the Makluan have been there for most of it," Gene added.

"That is the age we inherited from the original universe," Clea said. "But I was taught that the birth of the multiverse is much more recent. As each universe splits from another, both carry that common history with them."

It was ludicrous, impossible, yet Tony was certain it was true. He was also certain that Steve was becoming more and more agitated as the explanation progressed...

"Could individuals exist in more than one universe?" Steve asked now.

_Oh, no, no, no. That can't be what he's thinking._

But Clea was already answering. "Many do. Particularly as... shadows... of those who existed in the first universe. Even where they do not, they leave traces." For a moment, it appeared she was going to say more, but, plainly thinking better of it, looked down at the artefact in her hands. "I cannot use this device," she said. "It is a quite specific magic, coded to a personality or personalities, to their souls. I doubt Doom himself in his full pomp, or my tutor Stephen Strange, could master it."

"Tony did," Steve said. "At least, it responded to him."

"It knocked me out and gave me hallucinations and a splitting headache is what it did!"

"Which it has not done to anyone else?" Clea looked hard at Tony. "Do you also ask what your soul-mate asks? That an attempt is made to bring the soul and mind that first occupied that body back to it."

 _No, no, no!_ Tony thought. "If it's what Steve really wants," he said.

Steve's voice shook in his agony. "N-not what I want. Never what I want. But what I have to do."

"Take the artefact together," Clea said, holding it out, flat on both palms.

Steve was watching Tony, his expression so conflicted that Tony could not bear to see it.

 _Tony,_ , Jean's voice said in his mind. _It will be okay. Clea has lowered her shields so I can relay this message to you. She is sure that what Steve is asking is impossible. But the artefact may do something else. She thinks it will. It has been speaking to her. I can't hear it, but she... well, she thinks it sounds like you._

Tony shivered, but "Together," he said. 

_And if it kills both of us, it will be better than living without Steve._

Their hands joined on the artefact.

And they knew each other. 

It wasn't so much like fireworks but more like the last piece of a jigsaw fitting into place, the final adjustment to a perfectly tuned machine. All the desperate sex, Tony realised, had been reaching for this... comfort.

 _Tony?_ a mental voice both Steve and not-entirely-Steve asked.

 _Steve?_ Because the mind and emotion was the Steve he knew but something, perhaps 'soul' after all, was too large and complex for any human, even for Steve.

"That was my purpose, to rejoin his shattered soul with ours." It was the artefact speaking to him, in his own voice: "He is whole now, though he only has the shreds of memory that cling to those splinters. You already had most of my soul. Now the rest of it can come home. This time, guard him well."

A wave of emotion rolled over him; of affection, of affirmation, but without threat. It sank into him and through him, bringing new knowledge. Then the artefact vanished under his hands, though the feelings didn't; they simply faded into the background, ready to come back when called.

Tony said to Steve, with utter certainty, "You are not the man who originally wore that body, but the only part of him that survived death is part of you, even if his memories aren't."

Steve was looking at him with wide and wild eyes. "You... dear God, Tony, who— what are we?" 

"Soulmates," Tony said. "As for the rest of it, I guess we'll find out," and kissed him.

Behind them, Jean offered her raised hand for a high five. Gene promptly complied, while Clea looked puzzled for a moment, then joined in.

 

That night, they went to sleep in Steve's bed. Tony was no longer troubled by his parents having slept – or even that they had had sex – there. Besides, they were both exhausted. Even though Gene had gotten rid of most of the evidence of alien – and Doomian – incursion, clean up had taken a while, and their helpers had performed a sort of Farewell symphony. The first person collected had been Clea. Her transport had arrived in a traditional puff of smoke; a man dressed very untraditionally in blue tunic and tights, plus a red cloak with an ear-high collar and a huge gold broach clasping the cloak at his throat. Tony envied him the neatly trimmed facial hair, but not the white streaks at his temples or the lines in his face.

Clea had introduced him as her teacher and mentor, Doctor Stephen Strange, who had looked at them all with cold, suspicious eyes, flung his cloak around Clea and vanished.

It was when the rest of them were sprawled on the sofas, chatting amiably over the remains of the frozen pizza and ice cream, that Illyana had stepped out of one of her glowing discs, followed by a whole gaggle of spandex-clad teenagers led by Summers and spoiling for a fight. It turned out that Illyana had gotten temporarily lost in space-time, otherwise they would have been here much earlier.

Jean had sighed with disappointment, offered little in the way of explanation to Summers, kissed Steve and Tony – and Gene, to his obvious astonishment – on the cheek, waved goodbye and left with the spandex-brigade via Illyana's unreliable transport. Tony could only hope they had returned to Xavier's safely.

Soon after that, Gene had said his goodbyes, and vanished, though without the puff of smoke.

It felt lonely without them.

Maybe they also could go home now. Except for all those problems with SHIELD.

 

_Stark Cabin, Grey Goose Lake, New York State. Friday, 2:15 am_

It was the softest of noises that woke Steve, a small gasp of surprise, cut off sharply as if someone else had stifled it with a hand. He shook Tony awake, keeping him quiet with the same technique.

Someone opened the door from the living area. Steve reached to switch on the lights, saw the woman in the cat-suit from Howard's message, and a man in black and purple, with a drawn bow in his hand, and started to roll out of bed.

But Tony's arm was tight across his chest, holding him back. "Don't, Steve. They're top SHIELD agents – the Black Widow and Hawkeye – you wouldn't stand a chance."

Which was patently untrue, but Steve sensed that Tony was not in the least scared for either of them, so he held back.

The Black Widow was frowning at Tony. "Are you sure about that? Who is this?" There were layers and layers of suspicion in her voice.

Steve could feel Tony's self-confidence, and his certainty that Steve would pick up and follow his lead. And he was going to—

Oh. 

"He's my fiancé," Tony said. "His name's Stevens, soon to be changed to Stark. Or Stark-Stevens. Or Stevens-Stark. Whatever."

"You called him 'Steve'," Clint growled.

"Everyone does. He doesn't like his first name."

"Oh, and just what is his first name?"

"Ulysses," Steve said promptly. "My parents had a Civil War thing, y'know." It had seemed appropriate when he had discussed it with Howard, what seemed like a lifetime ago. Ulysses, the wanderer, who had finally come home. Howard had said he would fix it: Steve hadn't been sure how and hadn't cared much – then.

"And you're going to marry Stark?" Hawkeye asked, his voice dripping with scepticism.

Steve grinned. It had been a helluva ridiculous proposal, but Tony wasn't getting away now. "Of course," he said.

"And you're invited to the wedding, but only if you get the hell out of here and let us sleep."

The Black Widow nodded slowly, as if she was working her way to an understanding of the situation. "Congratulations," she said. "I'll be happy to eat your cake and drink your Champagne." She flicked a finger at Hawkeye and headed for the door.

"You owe us one, Stark. So do you, Rog— Stevens." Hawkeye followed her.

"That was deliberate," Steve said. "They aren't fooled."

"Nope. But they'll report back to Fury that you aren't Cap."

"I hope you're right. And it'll be just Stark."

"Huh?"

"'Steve Stark'."

"Oh." Much as he tried to keep it in, a huge grin spread over Tony's face. "So can we have engagement celebration sex?"

"Possibly," Steve said, trying to keep his own face straight. It was impossible. As Tony hauled him down onto the pillows, and he breathed a silent thank you to the original Captain America. He'd try and live up to that heroism. Though maybe not in the same way. Tony had promised to make him a suit of armour, after all.

**Author's Note:**

> [Kakushimiko's art on Tumblr](http://kakushimiko.tumblr.com/post/153785277762/and-here-is-my-second-posting-for-the-captainiron?soc_src=mail&soc_trk=ma#disqus_thread)


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